taken by direct attack, and instead began laying down trenches to allow him to bring artillery to bear on the structure. Parliamentary attacks broke the pipe carrying water into the castle, and the cisterns in the courtyard were destroyed by exploding shells, forcing the garrison to depend on the older castle well. With the castle still holding out, Colonel Birch built an enormous mortar called "Roaring Meg", able to fire a gunpowder-filled shell in weight, in a local forge. Birch concentrated his efforts on the north-west tower, using his mortar against the masonry and undermining the foundations with his sappers. Lingen responded with a counter-mine dug out under Parliament's own tunnel. This would probably have succeeded, but Birch brought his mortar forward under the cover of darkness and launched a close-range attack on the tower, which collapsed and buried Lingen's counter-mine. Down to their last four barrels of gunpowder and thirty barrels of beer, and with a direct assault now imminent, the Royalists surrendered. According to tradition, the garrison left to the tune of "Sir Henry Lingen's Fancy". Despite the damage, Tyler was able to move back into his castle, which was now protected by a small Parliamentary garrison. After investigation by Parliamentary agents Brown and Selden, however, the castle was slighted the following year, which rendered it impossible to defend. The Countess of Kent, the new owner of the castle, was given £1,000 in damages, but chose not to rebuild the fortification as it was by then virtually uninhabitable. 18th and 19th-century history After the Civil War, Goodrich Castle remained with the Earls of Kent until 1740, when it was sold by Henry Grey to Admiral Thomas Griffin. Griffin undertook some restoration of the castle but retained it as a ruin. During the 1780s the concept of the picturesque ruin was popularised by the English clergyman William Gilpin. Goodrich Castle was one of the ruins he captured in his book Observations on the River Wye in 1782, writing that the castle was an example of the "correctly picturesque" landscape. By this time, the castle was in a slow state of decay. Theodore Fielding, an early Victorian historian, noted how the "castle's situation, far from human dwellings, and the stillness which that solitude, insures to its precinct, leaves contemplation to all the solemnity, that is inspired by the sight of grandeur sinking in dignity, into decay". The Regency and Victorian