There was one dungeon under the Round Tower, which was reached by passing down some winding steps, into which no ray of light ever entered, as dark and dismal a place as could be imagined.  Here Earl Rivers and his fellow peers were incarcerated, praying for their execution to end their misery.  There was also a cellar for the storage of food and drink, sunk some forty or fifty feet in the solid rock, and capable of holding two or three hundred men, and this too was used as a dungeon by the Royalists.  Here the prisoners taken by the Royalist army were confined, and many of their names appeared cut in the walls of solid rock.  The history of these places, if it could be written, would form a chapter of horrors of the most dreadful character, as in olden times prisoners were often forgotten by their captors, and left in the dungeons to perish.

It was not without a tinge of satisfaction that we heard that the Earl of Lancaster, to whom the castle belonged, was himself placed in one of these dungeons after the Battle of Boroughbridge in 1322, and after being imprisoned there a short time, where he had so often imprisoned others, was led out to execution.

The third siege of Pontefract Castle happened in the autumn of 1648, for after the Parliamentarians had gained the upper hand, the castles that still held out against them were besieged and taken, but the turn of Pontefract Castle came last of all.  Oliver Cromwell himself undertook to superintend the operations, and General Lambert, one of the ablest of Cromwell’s generals, born at Kirkby Malham, a Yorkshire village through which we had passed some days before, was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the forces.  He arrived before the castle on December 4th, 1648, but such was the strength of the position that though he had a large number of soldiers and a great service of artillery, it was not until March 25th, 1649, when scarcely one hundred men were left to defend the walls, that the garrison capitulated.  Meantime the tremendous effect of the artillery brought to bear against them had shattered the walls, and finally Parliament ordered the castle to be dismantled.  With the surrender of this castle the Civil War came to an end, but not before King Charles I had been beheaded.

[Illustration:  THE GATE AND KEEP, PONTEFRACT CASTLE.]

Last year, before we began our walk from London to Lancashire, we visited Whitehall and saw the window in the Banqueting-hall through which, on January 30th, 1649, about two months before Pontefract Castle surrendered, he passed on his way to the scaffold outside.

In its prime Pontefract Castle was an immense and magnificent fortification, and from its ruins we had a fine view on all sides of the country it had dominated for about six hundred years.