And if you've ever thought about what happened to that kind of temporal power, this is also a pretty good place to stand. Today the abandoned castle is a tangle of shrubs and trees, a roofless tumble of stone ruled by birds and preservation bureaucrats in an office somewhere else.
Today it is the farmers, not the barons, who preside over the hills of Herefordshire, a swath of west-central England nestled against the border with Wales. And what has happened under their watch in the past several years is an extraordinary thing. In a nation whose tourist appeal has long been its historical monuments - chilly gray medieval castles, the grand traces of men like de Mortimer - a new kind of history has intruded. It is the inns, the farms, the charming houses, and most remarkably the traditional food that is now the chief draw of Herefordshire, the living legacy not of the feudal lords, but of the generations of people who lived and died in their shadow.
Today Herefordshire may be one of rural Britain's most interesting places to visit, and it is the farmers that make it so.
I had spent a lot of time in England in my life without ever visiting Herefordshire, but on my most recent trip I decided to go somewhere new. I rented a car at Heathrow Airport and drove west from London, no more than a few hours.
Because development never really swept over the county, Herefordshire today has not only a wealth of farmland but also perhaps the largest concentration of black-and-white half-timber houses in Britain. To encourage visitors, a 40-mile driving route was developed two decades ago, a trail of a dozen or so picturesque villages. To drive from one to another feels like passing through a back lot of Shakespearean stage sets.
