Qualla: Wigmore Castle

Wigmore Castle: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Percy Benzie Abery, CC0. Wigmore Castle is what almost no other major British castle is: untidied. Nature has been allowed to keep most of what it took. Trees grow inside curtain walls. The motte is buried under centuries of leaf-fall and stone slip. The tower stumps emerge from the green like teeth half-pulled from a jawbone. English Heritage took the site in 1995 specifically to preserve it as a romantic ruin rather than a manicured monument, a deliberate refusal to do what Victorians did everywhere else. Walk the ridge above the village of Wigmore in northwest Herefordshire and you walk through the seat of one of the most dangerous families in medieval England, the Mortimers, whose claim to the throne would eventually carry them all the way to it.

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Image: Percy Benzie Abery | CC0

Wigmore Castle: A Saxon Mere, a Norman Power

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit PAUL FARMER, CC BY-SA 2.0. The land was called Merestun, settlement by the mere, when the Anglo-Saxon Gunnfrothr held it before the Conquest. William FitzOsbern, William the Conqueror's closest friend and the first Earl of Hereford, raised the original castle here around 1070 to anchor the new Norman lords...

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Image: PAUL FARMER | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wigmore Castle: The Lover Who Ruled England

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fabian Musto, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Mortimer who matters most is Roger, born in 1287. He inherited Wigmore in 1304, married the heiress Joan de Geneville and acquired Ludlow Castle and vast lands in Ireland with her. By the 1320s he was the most dangerous of Edward II's enemies. He escaped the Tower of London i...

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Image: Fabian Musto | CC BY-SA 2.0

Wigmore Castle: A Throne Within Reach

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tony Grist, Public domain. The Mortimers married into royalty after that. Edmund Mortimer married Edward III's granddaughter Philippa, and in 1381 their six-year-old son Roger was declared heir presumptive to the throne should Richard II die childless. That claim, carried through the female line, eventuall...

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Image: Tony Grist | Public domain

Wigmore Castle: What the Civil War Spared

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Philip Pankhurst, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the time of the English Civil War, Wigmore had passed through Elizabeth I's hands to the Harleys of Brampton Bryan. Sir Robert Harley sided with Parliament. With her husband away in London, Lady Brilliana Harley made the decisive call: rather than risk Wigmore being seized by ...

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Image: Philip Pankhurst | CC BY-SA 2.0