Alongside the older, genuinely medieval story of St Cuthbert recorded separately elsewhere in this collection, Lindisfarne carries a second haunting rooted considerably more obviously in literature than in any actual documented history. The figure usually named here is Constance de Beverley, a nun who fell in love with a knight and was severely punished for breaking her own sacred vows, in some tellings by being walled up alive within the priory itself as a final, permanent punishment. Her ghost is said to appear among the ruins, sometimes described simply and anonymously as a nun in grey or white rather than being called by her actual literary name.
Constance de Beverley is, in fact, a named character in Walter Scott's 1808 narrative poem Marmion, in which she meets precisely this fate at a religious house within the poem's own fictional narrative, and it is generally accepted among local historians studying the island's folklore that Scott's poem, rather than any genuinely documented medieval incident, is the direct source of the story now firmly attached to Lindisfarne itself.
That literary origin does not make the haunting any less real or meaningful to the people who continue to tell it locally today, but it does mean the tale should properly be understood as a piece of literary folklore that has taken root at a real, physical location, rather than as a case with any actual identifiable historical nun standing behind it, Constance existing as a genuine character on the page well before she ever became a reported ghost on the island itself.
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