The town stands on a
hill, and has a wide and cheerful market-place possessing an
eighteenth-century 'cross' on big open arches. It is a plain, classic
structure, 'erected by Mrs. Elisabeth Dupier Relict of Solomon Dupier,
Gent, in a cheerful and generous Compliance with his benevolent
Intention Anno Dom' 1734.'
The castle stood at the northern end of the town on a rocky eminence
just suited for the purposes of an early fortress, but of the stately
towers and curtain walls which have successively been reared above the
scarps, practically nothing besides foundations remains. The base of
the great round tower, prominent in all the prints of the castle in the
time of its greatest glory, fragments of the lower parts of other towers
and some dungeons or magazines are practically the only features of the
historic site that the imagination finds to feed upon. A long flight of
steps leads into the underground chambers, on whose walls are carved
the names of various prisoners taken during the siege of 1648. Below
the castle, on the east side, is the old church of All Saints with its
ruined nave, eloquent of the destruction wrought by the Parliamentary
cannon in the successive sieges, and to the north stands New Hall, the
stately Tudor mansion of Lord George Talbot, now reduced to the
melancholy wreck depicted in these pages.
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