Goodrich Castle

Goodrich Castle is a ruined medieval fortress on a rocky sandstone spur above the River Wye, north of the village of Goodrich in Herefordshire. It watched a crossing known as Walesford or Walford, on the line of the former Roman road from Gloucester to Caerleon as it passed from England into Wales. One measured account places the rock about 26 kilometres, or 16 miles, from Hereford and 6.4 kilometres, or 4 miles, from Ross-on-Wye, and another places the ruin about 4 miles downstream from Ross-on-Wye. The walls are local sandstone, the keep a light grey and the later work a darker red, coursed and squared as rubble with ashlar dressings.

The place is a concentric castle: an early tower inside a square of curtains and round towers, with an outer ward and a barbican beyond. It is ruined, open to visitors, and in the guardianship of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission. Historians have called it the most splendid castle in the county and one of the best examples of English military architecture, and also the most extensive ruin of its class in Herefordshire.

The Norman Conquest of England was the invasion of 1066. Edward the Confessor died in January of that year and Harold Godwinson was accepted as king. Harald Hardrada of Norway won at Fulford on 20 September and was killed at Stamford Bridge on 25 September. William, Duke of Normandy, landed at Pevensey on 28 September, and on 14 October his army killed Harold at Hastings.

William was not secure until after 1072. He confiscated the lands of the resisting English elite, granted them to his followers, and planted castles on strong points. The Domesday Book, the record of the great survey, was complete by 1086. Along the Welsh border the new lords held a chain of territories, the Welsh Marches, and raiding continued even on the English side of the line.

Godric of Mappestone was an Anglo-Saxon thane and landowner, named in Domesday in 1086 as a tenant of Howel in what is now Herefordshire. His own notice says he probably built the first timber castle in the late 1080s, when it was called Castellum Godrici, the castle of Godric, and that this name became the village of Goodrich. The castle account says a fortification was in existence by 1101 and was known as Godric’s Castle, probably after the same man, who is also called Godric Mappeson. One notice places his building by 1101 or 1102, and a later local report places the first castle around 1100.

Nothing of that timber work is visible now except the name. Victorian writers believed the site went back to the days of Cnut, before the Norman Conquest, and the place may have been one of a small number of Saxon forts on the Welsh border. Ditches outside the stone castle have been read as possible earlier defences. Cropmarks on an old print have been interpreted as an Iron Age hillfort levelled before the castle, or as a promontory fort.

Those readings remain suggestions.

At the start of the twelfth century the castle passed from Godric to William Fitz Baderon, thought to be his son-in-law, and in the 1120s to William’s son, Baderon of Monmouth. England then fell into the civil war called the Anarchy. Stephen and his cousin the Empress Matilda fought for the crown through the 1130s and 1140s. Baderon married Rohese de Clare.

The de Clares usually backed Stephen, and there are records that Baderon had to seize Goodrich during fighting in a district held mainly for Matilda. Grants of land tied to the castle are noted for Fitz Baderon in 1144. Some writers suspect that Baderon built the stone keep early in that conflict.

Stephen created Gilbert de Clare Earl of Pembroke in 1138. Gilbert, born about 1100 at Tonbridge, was the second son of Gilbert Fitz Richard and inherited the marcher castle of Striguil, later Chepstow, from his uncles. Stephen also gave him Pevensey. One account says Stephen gave him Goodrich about ten years before 1148.

Another says Stephen appointed him and that Gilbert eventually acquired the castle himself. Gilbert died on 6 January 1148. His son Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow, succeeded at about eighteen. Richard is one candidate for the keep.

A county record dates the square keep to about 1160 to 1170. The castle is named in the Pipe Roll of 1186. The keep may have been raised at any time between 1120 and 1176, and it is not certain who paid for it. Another account says it was almost certainly Richard.

A local report of 2026 says the castle was rebuilt in the mid-1100s by Richard. In 1154 Henry II deprived Richard of the earldom because the de Clares had supported Stephen, and one account says the castle was taken into royal hands that year, so that the king himself may have ordered the keep. Richard died in 1176, on 20 April in one notice and in June in another, of an infection in a leg or a foot, and was buried in Dublin. His son and daughter were children.

Henry II took the possessions into his own hands and protected the children’s inheritance, which is also described as the estate reverting to the Crown because the heirs were minors. The stone keep, sometimes called Macbeth’s Tower, replaced the earth and timber fort. It was meant to be secure, imposing, and relatively cheap. A single chamber on each floor measures only 5.5 by 4.5 metres, or 18 by 15 feet, inside, so the tower was more useful for defence than for daily living.

The first entrance was at first-floor level and was later turned into a window, with a new door at ground level. An earth mound once rose against the base, and the lowest courses of masonry are rougher. The keep is of three stages, with pilaster and clasping buttresses and a chevron string-course at second-floor level.

Richard I and his brother John kept the castle and manor for the Crown. In 1203, or in 1204 in another account, John transferred Goodrich to William Marshal to compensate him for lands lost in France. Marshal, born in 1146 or 1147, served Henry II, the Young King, Richard I, John, and Henry III. He was knighted in 1166, made his name in tournaments, and in 1189 married Isabel, also called Isabella, the daughter of Richard de Clare and Aoife.

The earldom of Pembroke was not formally his until 1199. He had already enlarged Chepstow and Usk, and he probably modernised Goodrich, replacing timber defences with a stone curtain and towers around the keep. In the last years of John’s reign many barons invited Prince Louis of France into southern England. Marshal stayed loyal.

After John died in October 1216 he had the nine-year-old Henry III crowned in haste at Gloucester, and he knighted the boy himself. The banquet was interrupted by news that Goodrich needed reinforcement against a Welsh attack, and Marshal left the feast to meet it. He was the governor of the young king and of the kingdom, helped drive out the French in 1217, and died on 14 May 1219 after taking the vows of a Knight Templar. He was buried in the Temple Church in London.

Marshal’s sons took the castle in turn. He left it to his eldest son William, who gave it to a younger brother, Walter. After William’s death the second son, Richard Marshal, took Goodrich. Richard led baronial opposition to Henry III and allied with the Welsh, and in 1233 Henry besieged the castle and held it for a time.

Walter received it again and died in 1245. The sons were all dead by 1245, and the Marshal inheritance was divided among five daughters and their descendants. In 1247 the castle passed by marriage to William de Valence, also called Guillaume de Lusignan, a French nobleman from the Cistercian abbey of Valence near Lusignan in Poitou. He was a younger son of Hugh of Lusignan and Isabella of Angoulême, John’s widow, and so a half-brother of Henry III and an uncle of the future Edward I.

The loss of Poitou in 1246 brought him and his brothers to England in 1247. Henry married him to Joan de Munchensi, also spelled Munchensy, born about 1230 and alive after 20 September 1307, the daughter of Warin de Munchensy and Joan Marshal. Her share of the Marshal estates included Pembroke and Wexford. The marriage made Valence rich and brought him the title Earl of Pembroke.

One account says he assumed those lordships between 1250 and 1260.

After 1250 the border grew more dangerous. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd raided English ground, and the Wye valley and Goodrich were particularly exposed. From the 1280s Valence built a much larger castle around the old keep and demolished most of Marshal’s curtain. He drew oak from several royal forests.

The work was going on while his nephew Edward I was building the great castles of north Wales, and the concentric plan at Goodrich is both like those castles and rare in England. A county survey dates a square enclosing wall with angle towers to the early thirteenth century, and says that the east curtain, the sedile in the chapel, and the foundations of the south-west tower survive from it. The same survey dates the present angle towers, the chapel, the gatehouse, the curtains, the domestic buildings, and the bridge to a rebuilding of about 1300. The legal description of the fabric puts the keep in the twelfth century, the east curtain and the south-west tower foundations in the thirteenth, the rest of the main castle in an early fourteenth-century rebuilding, and the outer ward and barbican in the later fourteenth century.

In 1925, clearance under the south-west tower found the foundations of an earlier tower.

Valence fought for Henry III in the Second Barons’ War. He was disliked as a foreign favourite, refused the Provisions of Oxford in 1258, and was besieged in Wolvesey Castle at Winchester until he left the country. He was reconciled with Simon de Montfort in Paris in 1259, returned to favour, fought at Lewes, fled again, and in 1265 landed in Pembrokeshire, joined the siege of Gloucester, and was at the royal victory of Evesham. He went on crusade to Palestine with the future Edward I, and from Pembrokeshire he was a mainstay of the wars against Llywelyn ap Gruffudd and later Dafydd.

In the war of 1282 to 1283 he negotiated the surrender of Castell-y-Bere. His son William was killed on 16 June 1282 at the battle of Llandeilo Fawr. William de Valence died at Bayonne on 13 June 1296 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

His widow, Countess Joan, kept Goodrich as dower and spent long periods there, often with her son Aymer and his wife Beatrice, also called Béatrice. Household accounts survive for two long stays in 1296 and 1297. Joan travelled with an entourage of up to 200 people and entertained relations and friends lavishly. She died in 1307, the year also given as after 20 September 1307, and Aymer inherited.

Aymer de Valence, born about 1270, was the second Earl of Pembroke and of Wexford. He married first Beatrice de Clermont and second Marie de Châtillon-sur-Marne, also known as Marie de St Pol, and he left no legitimate heir. He usually supported the king, though Edward II, who reigned from 1307 to 1327, gave him little cause for loyalty. In 1317, on the way back from a mission to the pope at Avignon, a French nobleman imprisoned him over a claimed debt and ransomed him for £10,400.

The repayments ruined him for the rest of his life. Before his death on 23 June 1324 he added an outer line of defence, including the barbican, inspired by the barbican at the Tower of London and possibly built by the same workmen. An earlier Valence barbican at Pembroke may have been a trial for it. The county survey places the outer ward and barbican soon after the work of about 1300, in the fourteenth century.

The result turned a fortress into a great house without giving up its defences, and it influenced the later conversion at Berkeley. While Joan was a minor heir’s predecessor in possession, the domestic rooms were already elaborate: a great hall, a solar, kitchen, buttery and pantry, many garderobes and fireplaces, and towers used as extra lodgings. The hall, 20 by 9 metres, or 66 by 30 feet, sits on the river side so that it could have large windows and a huge fireplace in the strongest part of the circuit. Servants and the lord’s household were planned to live apart, which was unusual in so tight a space.

Water was first raised from the courtyard well and later piped from a spring across the valley. By the early seventeenth century the kitchens had running water.

Edward II was born at Caernarfon on 25 April 1284, the fourth son of Edward I, and he was king from 1307 until he was deposed in January 1327. He died at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327. His favourites, first Piers Gaveston and then the Despensers, dominated the reign. Hugh Despenser the Younger, born about 1287 or 1289, became chamberlain in 1318 and, through his wife Eleanor de Clare, held Glamorgan after her brother Gilbert died at Bannockburn in 1314.

With his father, Hugh Despenser the Elder, he seized lands across the Marches from widows, from the wives of men out of favour, and from unmarried women. Aymer left Goodrich to his niece Elizabeth de Comyn, also Elizabeth Comyn. She was born on 1 November 1299 and died on 20 November 1372. Her mother was Joan de Valence.

Her father was John Comyn of Badenoch, the Red Comyn, murdered on 10 February 1306. While she was under age the castle was in Crown custody. Hugh Despenser the Younger kidnapped her in London, carried her to Herefordshire, and imprisoned her in her own castle at Goodrich. Threatened with death, she signed the castle and other lands over to the Despensers.

One account dates that surrender to April 1325 and another to March 1325. She then married Richard Talbot, the second Baron Talbot, who seized the castle back in 1326, shortly before Queen Isabella landed and the Despensers and Edward II fell. Talbot and Elizabeth recovered legal title the next year. Edward III later allowed Richard to make a dungeon under the keep for prisoners.

Goodrich stayed a favourite house of the Talbots. In 1402 Owain Glyndŵr rebelled against English rule, and Welsh forces entered the Goodrich district in 1404 and 1405. Gilbert Talbot, the young fifth Lord Talbot, was instrumental in pushing them back and holding the castle. During the fifteenth century the Talbots enlarged the lord’s rooms and added lodgings for servants and retainers.

Architectural evidence from that century includes a gallery at the west end of the chapel, extra rooms for retainers in the east range, another storey over the better rooms in the north range, opening into the chapel, and a building west of the gatehouse. In 1442 the Talbots became Earls of Shrewsbury, shortly before the Wars of the Roses, in which they supported Lancaster and were often away at Sheffield. John Talbot, named as the second Earl of Shrewsbury, died in the Lancastrian defeat at the Battle of Northampton in 1460. That battle was fought on 10 July 1460 by the River Nene.

The Earl of Shrewsbury was among the lords killed trying to save Henry VI, and about 300 other Lancastrians died. The castle was forfeited and given to the Yorkist William Herbert. John’s son, also John Talbot, made peace and recovered his lands and Goodrich before his own death in 1473. Another account says the fourth Earl finally regained possession in November 1485.

By the sixteenth century the castle was less fashionable. It was too far from London to serve as a base of power, and the family preferred newer houses, but it remained a judicial centre. In the 1530s the antiquary John Leland noted that part of it held prisoners for the local court, and that the ditch was sometimes used to store cattle taken from farmers. George, the sixth Earl, had custody of Mary, Queen of Scots, between 1569 and 1584 and spent much of his time at Sheffield.

In 1568 he married the widow Bess of Hardwick. A double marriage linked his son Gilbert and his daughter Grace to Bess’s daughter Mary and her son Henry. Gilbert Talbot and Mary stayed at Goodrich in 1576, and Gilbert sent his father local produce, a Monmouth cap, Ross boots, and perry. Another account says Gilbert and Mary moved to Goodrich in 1575, with Gilbert acting as his father’s steward.

The letter that records the gift was printed in 1791 by Edmund Lodge, the herald, in his selection from the Howard, Talbot, and Cecil manuscripts. Edmund Lodge was born in Poland Street, London, on 13 June 1756, the son of the rector of Carshalton. He resigned a cornet’s commission in 1773, became Bluemantle Pursuivant in 1782, and rose through Lancaster Herald and Norroy King of Arms to Clarenceux King of Arms. In 1832 he was appointed a knight of the Hanoverian Guelphic Order but was not made a knight bachelor, so he was not entitled to be called Sir.

He married Jane-Anne-Elizabeth Field on 27 April 1808. She died in May 1820. They had no children. He died at his house in Bloomsbury Square on 16 January 1839.

Gilbert Talbot died in 1616 without a male heir. Goodrich passed through his daughter Elizabeth to Henry Grey, heir to the earldom of Kent. The Greys did not live there. They let the castle to tenants.

The English Civil War was the series of wars between Royalists and Parliamentarians in England from 1642 to 1651, inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The first war was about the balance of power between Parliament and Charles I and ended in June 1646 with the king in custody. Royalist strength lay in the north, the west, and Wales. Parliament was stronger in the ports and the south and east.

During campaign seasons something like 120,000 to 150,000 soldiers could be in the field. The word Cavalier was used for the king’s supporters and Roundhead for Parliament’s. Before the war, building at Goodrich had revived. Richard Tyler, a local lawyer, became tenant and constable, in the early 1630s or in 1632, and carried out renovations.

Soon after fighting began, the Earl of Stamford, with Tyler’s help, garrisoned the castle for Parliament until December 1643, when Royalist pressure forced him back to Gloucester. Sir Henry Lingen then held it for the king, from late 1643 or early 1644. By the end of 1645 it was the centre of Royalist activity in the district. Lingen had about 200 men and 90 horses and raided Parliament’s forces.

Royalist troops burned farm buildings below the castle. Tyler was imprisoned, though not before he had begun to sell livestock and movable goods. Some writers of the time called the place Guthridge Castle. No modern earthworks were added, so the defences stayed essentially medieval.

Henry Lingen was born on 23 October 1612, lord of Sutton, Lingen, and Stoke Edith, the son of Edward Lingen and Blanche Bodenham. He was High Sheriff of Herefordshire in 1638 and again in 1643. Charles I knighted him at Hereford in 1645. His house at Freen’s Court in Sutton was besieged until Prince Rupert came to its relief.

He besieged Brampton Bryan, the house of his distant kinsman Robert Harley, which Brilliana Harley defended. He escaped from Hereford shortly before a surprise attack took the city in December 1645. That attack was led by Colonel John Birch, a Parliamentarian, on 17 December, after a Scottish army under the Earl of Leven had failed to take Hereford in a month-long siege and had withdrawn on 1 or 2 September. John Birch (soldier) was born on 7 September 1615 at Manchester, the eldest surviving son of the merchant Samuel Birch and Mary Birch.

He moved to Bristol in 1633 as a wine merchant. At the start of the war in August 1642 he was a captain in the Bristol militia. After the Royalists took Bristol in June 1643 he served under William Waller, was wounded at Alton on 13 December 1643, and was shot in the stomach at Arundel. He fought at Cheriton in March 1644 and at Cropredy Bridge in June, raised an infantry regiment, and spent the rest of the war in the south-west and the Welsh Marches.

He was at Bridgwater and Bristol in 1645, became governor of Hereford, fought at Stow-on-the-Wold in March 1646, and is credited with the capture of Goodrich. His own notice places that capture in June, just before the first war ended. He was a rough and bold speaker in Parliament, excluded at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648, and he died at home on 10 May 1691.

In 1646 Birch and Robert Kyrle marched south from Hereford to remove one of the last Royalist strongholds. There was personal dislike between Lingen and Birch. On 9 March, or on the night of 9 to 10 March, Birch burned the weakly defended stables in a surprise night attack, drove off the horses, and for a time stopped the garrison’s raids. Lingen replaced some of the horses and the raids resumed.

In June Birch came back and besieged the castle itself. It was too strong for a direct assault, so he dug trenches for artillery. Parliament’s fire broke the pipe that brought water in, and exploding shells destroyed the courtyard cisterns, so the garrison fell back on the old well. Birch had an enormous mortar cast, called Roaring Meg.

One account says it was made in a local forge and threw a gunpowder-filled shell of 85 to 90 kilograms, or 187 to 198 pounds. Another account gives a shell of about 85 kilograms, and another says over 90 kilograms. The mortar’s own notice gives a barrel 15.5 inches, or 390 millimetres, across, firing a hollow ball of 2 long hundredweight, which is 220 pounds or 100 kilograms, and calls it the largest mortar of the English Civil War. That notice says the piece and its ammunition were probably made near Lydbrook at Howbrook furnace and forge, whose owner, John Browne, supplied weapons to Parliament.

Birch aimed at the north-west tower, battering the masonry and mining the foundations. Lingen drove a counter-mine under Parliament’s tunnel. The counter-mine would probably have worked, but Birch brought the mortar up in the dark and fired at close range. The tower fell and buried the counter-mine.

Birch is said to have been so taken with the weapon that he fired the last 19 balls himself. The mortar’s notice also credits the capture of the castle to Sir Thomas Fairfax, while the siege narratives credit Birch. Down to four barrels of gunpowder and thirty barrels of beer, with an assault coming, the Royalists surrendered. Lingen’s notice says he held out until July 1646, when Birch broke the defences.

Another account dates the surrender to 31 July 1646. Tradition says the garrison left to the tune called Sir Henry Lingen’s Fancy, also known as Sir Harry’s Fancy. After Goodrich, Roaring Meg was used against Raglan. The county council has preserved it, and it has been on display at Goodrich since 2004.

Cannonballs found in excavations of the 1920s have also been brought back to the site.

Tyler was able to move back into the damaged castle, which a small Parliamentarian garrison protected. After an inquiry by the Parliamentarian agents Brown and Selden, the castle was slighted the next year, the work also being placed in 1648, so that it could no longer be defended. The slighting is described as the removal of battlements and damage to the main defences. The Countess of Kent, the new owner, was given £1,000 in damages and did not rebuild.

Lingen was later fined £6,000 for supporting the king. He died of smallpox in Gloucester on 22 January 1662, aged 49, on his way home from Parliament. The castle stayed with the Earls of Kent, later dukes, until it was sold to Admiral Thomas Griffin. One account dates that sale to 1740 and names the seller as Henry Grey.

Another dates it to 1755. Griffin did some repair and kept the place as a ruin.

In the 1780s William Gilpin popularised the picturesque ruin. In Observations on the River Wye, in 1782, he took Goodrich as an example of the correctly picturesque. Travellers by boat stopped there on the way down from Ross. Theodore Fielding, an early Victorian writer, described the solitude of a great building sinking into decay.

David Cox painted a watercolour of the ruins in 1815, and William Callow also painted them. William Wordsworth, born on 7 April 1770 and died on 23 April 1850, called Goodrich the noblest ruin in Herefordshire. He first came in 1793. An encounter with a little girl among the ruins led him to write the poem We are Seven in 1798, the year he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads.

Henry Neele was another poet drawn to the castle, in 1827. By the 1820s a guidebook could be bought on the spot, and Victorian visitors recorded a charge of sixpence to walk the ruins. Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick tried to buy the castle in the early 1820s and turn it back into a house. The owners would not sell.

In 1828 he built the neo-Gothic Goodrich Court next door and housed his armour collection there. Wordsworth returned in 1841 and was displeased that the new house spoilt the view. A new bridge over the Wye in 1828, and a railway in 1873 with a station near the bridge, brought more visitors. The railway closed in 1959.

Goodrich Court was demolished in 1949, which is also described as after the Second World War, and the older landscape returned.

By the early twentieth century the ruin was overgrown and structurally poor. The Office of Works began talks in 1915 with the owner, Mrs Edmund Bosanquet. Large collapses of the north-west tower and the curtain in 1919 helped her decision to give the castle to the Commissioners of Works in 1920. They cleared vegetation, consolidated the stone, and rebuilt some decayed masonry with stone reused from the site.

Those repairs hid some original work that might have explained the earlier castle, but they also revealed the older tower under the south-west corner. Later access works added a staircase, floors, and roofs in the gatehouse and chapel, a walkway on the east wall, and new stairs and bridges in the keep and the south-east tower. Since 1984 the public body that presents the castle has also been responsible for its conservation and for archaeological recording.

On 7 June 1942 Alan Blumlein was killed, aged 38, when the Halifax bomber in which he was flying crashed at Welsh Bicknor in Herefordshire during a secret trial of the H2S airborne radar. A note on the castle says that flight VS9977 crashed near Goodrich while testing that radar, and that Blumlein and several others died. Alan Blumlein was born on 29 June 1903 in Hampstead. He took 128 patents in telephony, sound recording, stereophonic sound, television, and radar.

The chapel’s west window is modern and commemorates the scientists, engineers, and servicemen who died in radar development between 1936 and 1976. The east window of the chapel was designed in 2000 by Nicola Hopwood and resets fifteenth-century glass. It lights the priest’s seat, the sedile. The fifteenth-century window frame replaced a taller thirteenth-century window.

The altar may be older than the castle.

The castle stands on a high rocky outcrop. On the weaker south and east sides, ditches 27 metres long and 9 metres deep, or 90 feet by 28 feet, were cut into the rock along a natural fissure, and the castle is moated there. Three great towers of the 1280s guard the square. They rise as circles from square pyramidal spurs, a Marcher form also used at St Briavels and at Tonbridge, meant to stop miners undercutting the towers.

The south-east tower keeps a trace of roll moulding below a lost parapet. The towers were formerly of three stages. The fourth corner is an asymmetrical gatehouse, a version of the Edwardian gatehouse with one tower much larger than the other, portcullises, murder-holes, and a drawbridge. The gatehouse is of three stages.

Its gateway is vaulted, with a portcullis groove at each end and a segmental pointed arch. A stone causeway runs out to a large barbican, now only about half its original height, with its own gate, planned to trap attackers between the gates. The barbican has a semi-circular front and a two-span bridge. The chapel sits in the eastward tower of the gatehouse, an unusual place forced by lack of room.

It is of three stages, with a fifteenth-century window of three trefoiled lights to the east and a similar window to the west. A slim octagonal stair turret stands at the chapel tower’s north-west corner. Beyond the main walls a stable block survives as a ruin with a cobbled floor. Accounts suggest the original stables held about 60 horses, and by the seventeenth century they had been enlarged.

A smaller curtain once covered the stables and the north and west sides and is now mostly gone. Traces of outer towers remain to the south-west and the north-west.

In the 1920s, workmen clearing the courtyard found the well, which had been filled and buried. The well-head had taken a direct hit in the siege, probably from a shell fired by Roaring Meg. Emptied to its base, 166 feet down, the shaft held shell fragments and objects from the yard and the service buildings in the middle of the seventeenth century. At the bottom were the bucket, windlass, and chain.

Above them were tools and household equipment mixed with cannonballs, preserved because the fill was waterlogged, and then a great depth of rubble from bomb-damaged buildings. The moat and the stables produced many cannonballs, other weapons, and horse gear. Among the recorded objects are a seventeenth-century wrought-iron caltrop, an incendiary cannonball of cast and wrought iron with spikes for setting timber alight, lead musket balls cast by the soldiers themselves, a flintlock pistol barrel, a German stoneware tankard from the north side of the moat, a gilded copper-alloy spur from the barbican, a baker’s peel and a laundry paddle and a claw hammer from the well, a harness mount, and plaster pendants from a ceiling, probably of the sixteenth century, in the basement of the north-west tower. Several plumber’s tools suggest that the drains were a lasting problem.

A wild polyanthus found at the castle has been suggested as a descendant of plants from a medieval garden.

An electricity trench dug beyond the south, east, and north sides in 1987 and 1988 revealed a cemetery, apparently Christian, on the eastern side. A watching brief in 1988 on a cable trench for the ticket office, running along the access road, found a Christian burial ground near the edge of the ditch to the south of the castle. The burials’ closeness to the ditch has been taken to mean that the graveyard is older than the ditch. In 1996 small trenches for the bases of graphics panels showed that significant remains lay directly under the surface in the barbican and the great hall, and stone flags were found in the kitchen.

A condition audit of the chapel paintings in 1996 and 1997 found fragments of original plaster and limewash on the east wall, on its south side, and in the window recesses, two on the south and one on the north. Those recesses keep traces of paint: a red-line pattern imitating masonry in the soffits, and what may have been a foliate border in the western recess on the south wall. The paintings may be of the thirteenth or the fourteenth century. The remains were too slight to show the whole scheme.

A condition survey in October 2023 recommended remedial conservation of these surfaces.

In 2008 the removal of a kiosk and its concrete base in the barbican was watched, and no archaeologically significant sediments were seen. The same year the modern gravel was taken off the dungeon floor down to the bedrock, the floor was cleaned, and the walls, floor, and vault were photographed. A contour survey was made. A few stones at the entrance suggest that a stone floor had once been there.

The north-west interior wall contained a small recess and a sealed passage leading to the keep. The recorded finds from that clearance were none. In October 2019 unauthorised metal-detecting inside the scheduled area was reported. Staff recorded patches of disturbance in the dry moat and east of the barbican, photographed them, and logged them by satellite position.

Material was recovered from two damaged areas. Different weathering suggested that the digging had happened on two separate occasions. In the same period, repairs to the solar arch used reconstructed pier capitals and replacement voussoirs where the stone was decaying quickly.

A fresh look at the chapel, begun in a survey of wall paintings that has run since 2019, found more than the red masonry pattern. Conservators working from scaffolding in a recess of the south-wall window embrasure uncovered a small male face in three-quarter profile, with narrow eyes, a pointed nose, thick eyebrows, and wavy hair. It survives as a red under-drawing. The overlying paint has gone.

It sits high in the window recess, measures about 5 centimetres, or 2 inches, across, and is set in a fragmentary frame. Further pieces of the border appear in other parts of the recesses, and a painted halo marks a second, less well preserved figure. A microscopic particle of the blue pigment azurite was found in the same work. The face has been dated to the mid-1200s to the early 1300s, more than 700 years ago, and a caption has also called it a painting of 800 years ago.

The masonry pattern behind it remains dated to the thirteenth or the fourteenth century. The discovery is read as evidence that the embrasures once held a sequence of small framed scenes, a biblical, moral, or historical story, and that figurative painting of this quality is rare in a secular building. The chapel is understood as a private room for high-ranking worship, and the two window recesses have ledges that could have been seats. Fragments of painting in the chapel of the Agricola Tower at Chester, a room of about 1210, have been used as a starting point for a digital reconstruction of the lost scheme at Goodrich.

The Chester scheme itself, with miracles of the Virgin, prophets, scenes from the early life of Jesus, and miracles of Edward the Confessor, has been reconstructed separately and is not claimed as the picture at Goodrich. The Goodrich painting is described as fragile, recorded so that it can be watched.

The standing ruin was scheduled on 27 October 1919, and that scheduling was amended on 31 January 1997. The buildings were listed at the highest grade on 14 February 1966. The legal note calls the castle an extensive and remarkably complete border fortress and an important example of military architecture, records that it belonged to the Talbots from the fourteenth century, changed sides in the Civil War, was besieged and taken in 1646, and has been a ruin ever since. Several legends are told on the site.

The keep’s other name, Macbeth’s Tower, is tied to a story of an Irish chieftain held there, who is said to have died trying to escape and to haunt the tower. Another story says that Colonel Birch’s niece, Alice Birch, loved a Royalist, Charles Clifford, and that the pair died in a flash flood while crossing the Wye before the final assault, and remain as ghosts. These are local tales, not records of the siege.