Warkworth Hermitage, Northumberland: A hermit's solitary refuge after an unspeakable tragedy

The Warkworth Hermitage is a cave where a hermit lived as penance for an accidental double killing. Annunciata Elwes explains more.

Warkworth Hermitage, Northumberland.
Warkworth Hermitage, Northumberland.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

Modern life feels distant once you’ve walked the lonely half-mile from Warkworth Castle, rung a bell and paid a boatman to row you across the River Coquet. Amid trees, you’ll find a secluded hermit’s cave and tiny chapel hewn into rock, complete with vaulted bays and relief sculpture.

Inside the Hermitage and Chapel of the Holy Trinity, Warkworth, Northumberland.

From the 15th century to the Dissolution, the Earls of Northumberland paid a chaplain to live and say Mass there, but far more romantic is the tale recounted in the 1771 ballad by Thomas Percy, The Hermit of Warkworth; Sir Bertram of Bothal accidentally killed both his brother and his lover, then lived in solitude in the riverside cave for the rest of his days. He is said to have carved the effigy of a lady that can be seen in the chapel, with a figure kneeling at her feet, to honour his love.

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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.