Durham Cathedral, begun in 1093, ranks among the truly great buildings of Norman England, and like most medieval cathedrals of its scale and importance, it has accumulated a genuine stock of folklore alongside its thoroughly documented architectural and religious history. One particular story claims the Devil himself, hoping to weaken the ambitious new building before it could ever be completed, travelled specifically to Castle Eden to find an inferior, flawed piece of limestone, and carried it back toward Durham hidden in his own apron, intent on smuggling a fatal weakness directly into the cathedral's foundations.
As he flew over the city carrying his stolen stone, the story goes, the apron strap holding it suddenly broke, and the stone fell from his grasp, landing well short of the foundations he had originally intended it for, his sabotage undone by nothing more dramatic than an ordinary broken strap.
The tale is told today as a direct explanation for an odd, discoloured block that visitors can sometimes be shown among the cathedral's own stonework, in exactly the way many English churches have some particular stone or visible mark blamed specifically on the Devil's own failed interference in their construction. It is folklore rather than a haunting or any documented historical incident, but it has been retold consistently enough locally, and attached specifically enough to a physical, pointable-at stone, to be genuinely worth recording as part of Durham's wider stock of supernatural tradition.
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