Created By Colonel Birch For The Siege of Goodrich Castle
Roaring Meg was a mortar cast in 1646 for the siege of Goodrich Castle. With a 15.5 inch barrel diameter and firing a 2cwt hollow ball filled with gunpowder, Roaring Meg was the largest mortar of the war. She was instrumental in the capture of Goodrich Castle in 1646 by Sir Thomas Fairfax. During the siege the Roundhead commander, Colonel Birch, was so excited with his new weapon he personally fired the last 19 balls. Roaring Meg is preserved by Herefordshire Council and has been on display at Goodrich Castle since 2004.
Read more about this topic: Roaring Meg (cannon), English Civil War
Famous quotes containing the words created, colonel, birch, siege, goodrich and/or castle:
“He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe;”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“I am asked if I would not be gratified if my friends would procure me promotion to a brigadier-generalship. My feeling is that I would rather be one of the good colonels than one of the poor generals. The colonel of a regiment has one of the most agreeable positions in the service, and one of the most useful. “A good colonel makes a good regiment,” is an axiom.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“The birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe,—these are the only traces of man, a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the “South Sea”; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“To my big brother George—the richest man in town.”
—Frances Goodrich (1891–1984)
“He that is born to be hanged shall never be drowned.”
—14th-century French proverb, first recorded in English in A. Barclay, Gringore’s Castle of Labour (1506)