If the castle does not show many interesting buildings beyond the keep and the long line of walls and drum-towers, there is so much concerning it that is of great human interest that I should scarcely feel able to grumble if there were still fewer remains.  Behind the ancient houses in Quay Street rises the steep, grassy cliff, up which one must climb by various rough pathways to the fortified summit.  On the side facing the mainland, a hollow, known as the Dyke, is bridged by a tall and narrow archway, in place of the drawbridge of the seventeenth century and earlier times.  On the same side is a massive gateway, looking across an open space to St. Mary’s Church, which suffered so severely during the sieges of the castle.  The maimed church—­for the chancel has never been rebuilt—­looks across the Dyke to the shattered keep, and so apparent are the results of the cannonading between them that no one requires to be told that the Parliamentary forces mounted their ordnance in the chancel and tower of the church, and it is equally apparent that the Royalists returned the fire hotly.

The great siege lasted for nearly a year, and although his garrison was small, and there was practically no hope of relief, Sir Hugh Cholmley seems to have kept a stout heart up to the end.  With him throughout this long period of privation and suffering was his beautiful and courageous wife, whose comparatively early death, at the age of fifty-four, must to some extent be attributed to the strain and fatigue borne during these months of warfare.  Sir Hugh seems to have almost worshipped his wife, for in his memoirs he is never weary of describing her perfections.

‘She was of the middle stature of women,’ he writes, ’and well shaped, yet in that not so singular as in the beauty of her face, which was but of a little model, and yet proportionable to her body; her eyes black and full of loveliness and sweetness, her eyebrows small and even, as if drawn with a pencil, a very little, pretty, well-shaped mouth, which sometimes (especially when in a muse or study) she would draw up into an incredible little compass; her hair a sad chestnut; her complexion brown, but clear, with a fresh colour in her cheeks, a loveliness in her looks inexpressible; and by her whole composure was so beautiful a sweet creature at her marriage as not many did parallel, few exceed her in the nation; yet the inward endowments and perfections of her mind did exceed those outward of her body, being a most pious virtuous person, of great integrity and discerning judgment in most things.’

Her husband speaks of her ‘sweet good-nature,’ and of how she was always ready to be touched with other people’s wants before her own.  That such nobleness of character should shine out brilliantly during the siege was inevitable, and Sir Hugh tells us that, though she was of a timorous nature, she bore herself during great danger with ’a courage above her sex.’  On one occasion Sir John Meldrum, the Parliamentary commander, sent proposals to Sir Hugh Cholmley, which he accompanied with savage threats, that if his terms were not immediately accepted he would make a general assault on the castle that night, and in the event of one drop of his men’s blood being shed he would give orders for a general massacre of the garrison, sparing neither man nor woman.