.

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