Warkworth Hermitage is a small chapel carved directly into the sandstone riverbank half a mile from Warkworth Castle, reachable only by boat even today, almost certainly established around 1400 by the first Earl of Northumberland and later used as a chantry staffed by clergy between 1489 and 1536. Its atmospheric, genuinely isolated setting made it a natural subject for storytelling long after its original religious purpose had come to an end and the chantry itself had fallen silent.
The best-known story attached to it is not medieval at all, however, but was actually set down by Bishop Thomas Percy in a 1771 ballad called The Hermit of Warkworth, a considerably later literary composition rather than an inherited piece of oral tradition. In the tale, Bertram de Bothal of Bothal Castle loved Isabel Widdrington, who demanded proof of his devotion before she would accept him as a suitor. In the resulting chain of events Bertram accidentally killed his own brother and Isabel was mortally wounded in the same tragic episode; Bertram was subsequently given sanctuary by Lord Percy at Warkworth, renounced his worldly possessions, and built the hermitage himself to live out the remainder of his life in grief and genuine penance for what he had done.
The chapel's genuine history as a real chantry is well documented through surviving records, but the Bertram and Isabel story is understood locally to be literary invention rather than an actual historical record, in the same vein as the Lindisfarne and Dunstanburgh legends found elsewhere in the county.
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