Since we’d just become English Heritage members when visiting Stonehenge the day before, we decided to check out this castle on another day trip. From Bristol, it’s only a 45-minute drive to reach the castle, and keep your eyes peeled as the entrance is easy to miss. There’s plenty of car parking available at the site. With the English Heritage membership, we get free entry but you can check prices here. At the entrance, you’re given an audio guide and the staff member points you towards the start of the self-guided tour. There are several detailed panels with numbers that you enter into the audio guide for more information. It begins by taking you throughout the open areas of the site where the castle’s rooms would have been.
Today, there are just the remains of the towers and some of the foundations; but the audio guide and the panels do a good job of describing how the castle would have been. Several stories include an imprisoned wife, a wife killing her husband, and medieval visitors eating human remains in the tombs. Towards the end of the tour, we visit the chapel which has painted walls from medieval times. These were discovered underneath the top layer of paint so they are quite faint. Inside the chapel, there are family tombs of the Hungerford family who owned the castle. These tombs have been carved with the human shape of the family member buried there. Following the chapel, you can brave descending into the dark chilly crypt. There are several human-shaped lead coffins here where medieval visitors used to poke to eat the human remains. This is the final stop of the self-guided tour after which we returned the audio guides and headed back to Bristol.
