Berry Pomeroy Castle

The Pomeroy family held the manor of Berry Pomeroy from the eleventh century, their lands granted in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. The castle itself came surprisingly late: it was begun in the later fifteenth century, a fortified house rather than a great military stronghold, with a gatehouse and curtain wall on the edge of a wooded ravine. In December 1547 the impoverished Sir Thomas Pomeroy sold it to Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, brother of Henry VIII's queen Jane Seymour and, in that same year, Lord Protector to his nine-year-old nephew Edward VI, which made him effectively the ruler of England.

Somerset fell from power and died in 1552, but his descendants kept Berry Pomeroy. Inside the old defences they built a modest early Elizabethan mansion, and from about 1600 they enlarged it on a palatial scale, intending a house to rival Longleat or Audley End. The money ran out before the vision did. The project foundered, the Seymours moved on, and by 1700 the castle was an abandoned shell, stripped of anything useful and left to the ivy.

The romance of that ruin is what produced the ghosts. Historians note that the White Lady story appears to originate in a Gothic novel, The Castle of Berry Pomeroy, published in 1806 under the pseudonym Edward Montague, and that the "dungeon" of St Margaret's Tower is in reality a medieval gun emplacement. The Blue Lady is older, resting on the testimony of a Georgian physician. Neither has a documented Pomeroy behind her, which has never stopped either from being seen.

The oldest sighting on record is Sir Walter Farquhar's. The Georgian physician said he saw a woman in blue in a panelled room of the castle in the late eighteenth century, and his account has been retold ever since as the foundation of the Blue Lady legend. By the Victorian period the castle's reputation was fixed, and the White Lady of St Margaret's Tower had joined her, apparently borrowed from Edward Montague's 1806 novel and treated as history within a generation.

Modern reports follow familiar lines: a figure in white seen waving from the tower, a woman in grey among the mansion ruins, a cavalier, shadow figures, voices, cold spots and unexplained lights. Several visitors claim that apparitions absent to the naked eye have turned up in their photographs afterwards, particularly on night visits. In 2018 a ghost hunter's video of what looked like two riders passing the castle at night circulated widely, linked by some to the legend of the Pomeroy brothers who supposedly rode off the battlements.

Television arrived in 2005, when Yvette Fielding's Most Haunted team broadcast a three-night Most Haunted Live from the castle under the title "Terror at Torbay". Reviewers were divided about what, if anything, was captured, but the programme cemented Berry Pomeroy's place on the ghost-tourism circuit. It is also the source of the much-repeated line that an English Heritage guidebook once named it the most haunted castle in England.

The sceptical view is worth hearing. Folklorists point out that the White Lady's story is fiction, that the "dungeon" is a gun emplacement, and that no documented Margaret or Eleanor Pomeroy fits the tale; the castle's power, they argue, lies in the way a ruin in a dark wood invites us to fill it. Believers reply that people saw things here long before anyone wrote them down.

Berry Pomeroy Castle is cared for by English Heritage and open to the public, typically from ten in the morning until late afternoon, with the days of the week varying by season and last admission an hour before closing; check the English Heritage website for current times and prices before you set out. The castle is about two and a half miles from Totnes in South Devon, at the end of a narrow lane, with a small car park of around 25 to 30 spaces some fifty metres from the entrance. It is free to castle visitors but fills at peak times, and coaches cannot reach the site.

Allow an hour or two. The woodland setting is lovely in spring and autumn, and the Castle Café, which is independently run and has its own opening hours, serves light lunches and drinks. Paths are uneven and the mansion ranges involve steps, so wheelchair access is limited. English Heritage does not run ghost tours here, though paranormal groups occasionally organise evening events; the castle is closed at night otherwise.

There is no accommodation at the castle itself. Totnes, with its Norman castle, market and river, is the obvious base, and Dartmouth, Torquay and the South Hams villages are all within easy reach for a longer stay.