Hereford; Sunday, 13 July, 2025

After breakfast I checked out of the hotel and headed over to the station to pick up the bus out to my out-of-town attraction for the day. The bus from Hereford took me over to the town of Ross-on-Wye where I had a 20-minute connection onto the next bus so I had a little bit of time to wander around the town and take in the Market Hall and the town centre before returning to the bus stop to catch the next bus onto Goodrich.

Goodrich castle is located on hill above a curve in the river Wye, which at the time it was being constructed was effectively the border between England and Wales, as is one of many castles built in this part of the country.

The imposing keep of the castle is from the original Norman building, but much of the rest of the castle is later additions as it changes from defensive fort more into a stately home for the local landowners. Changes they made included inserting a chapel with a large window in the gatehouse, not something that would make defending the castle easy if it had seen battle.

The castle only really saw battle during the English Civil War when it was under the control of Royalists, but at the end of the war the parliamentarian forces pretty much destroyed the building using a mortar called Roaring Meg, which is on display in the courtyard of the castle, rendering it into a very picturesque ruin.

I spent a long time wandering around the castle and it’s grounds before it was time to start making a move back towards the ticket office and more importantly café for a late lunch before heading back to the bus stop for the bus back into Ross-on-Wye

My connection in this direction was just over 30 minutes so I was able to explore a bit more of the town, including the Alms Houses, Church and the towns fake walls, constructed in a gothic style when the main road into town was reconstructed in the mid-19th century.

The bus journey back into Hereford went smoothly and I quickly headed back to the hotel to grab my bags and make my way over to the station where, with the monotonous regularity that has affected every trip in the summer of 2025 using the railways, the journey home started to collapse in on itself. Firstly the 9-car train that should have run had been replaced with a five-car train, so my reserved seat no longer existed, but as it started in Hereford that wasn’t too much of an issue as it would be easy to get a seat here.

What was more problematic was that the train was now going to terminate at Oxford rather than going through to London, which meant at least a 30-minute delay and the potential for having to end up standing for the hour or so from Oxford into London. Of course, this assumed the rail company knew what it was doing and as we approached Oxford it turned out that the train would now be continuing to Reading instead to terminate there, so we pressed on seeing how close we could get into London with a seat before being forced to stand in cramped conditions.

By the time the train reached Reading it was running quite late, and was only just ahead of another train coming up from Exeter, which we were able to transfer across onto, but it still meant that we ended up in Paddington just over the magical 15 minutes to make GWR have to pay compensation.