Qualla: Warkworth Hermitage

Warkworth Hermitage: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joan Robinson, CC BY-SA 2.0. To reach Warkworth Hermitage, you take a small boat across the River Coquet. There is no road. The path on the south bank does not lead here. You step off the boat onto a narrow strip of grass beneath a sandstone cliff, climb a short staircase cut into the rock, and walk through a door into a chapel that medieval masons hollowed out of the cliff itself. The altar is still there. So is the tomb effigy of a woman, carved in stone, lying where she has lain for more than six hundred years. The Coquet runs past below.

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Image: Joan Robinson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Warkworth Hermitage: Carved from the Cliff

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit hayley green, CC BY-SA 2.0. The hermitage has two parts. An outer portion is built of conventional stone blocks against the cliff face. The inner portion is hewn directly into the sandstone above the river. That inner space comprises a chapel and a smaller chamber, each with its own altar. The fact that med...

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Image: hayley green | CC BY-SA 2.0

Warkworth Hermitage: The Woman on the Tomb

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit hayley green, CC BY-SA 2.0. Inside the chapel is an altar-tomb bearing a female effigy. The tradition recorded by Bishop Thomas Percy in his 1771 ballad The Hermit of Warkworth attributes the hermitage to one of the Bertrams of Bothal Castle, the story being that he retreated here in penitence after a trage...

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Image: hayley green | CC BY-SA 2.0

Warkworth Hermitage: Sketches and Verses

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Artist: T. Allom - Engraved by: M. J. Starling, CC0. The hermitage has drawn artists and writers for as long as there has been an English picturesque movement. Engravings circulated in the early nineteenth century. The 1814 drawings of the interior and exterior survive in print collections. Letitia Elizabeth Landon, one of the most...

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Image: Artist: T. Allom - Engraved by: M. J. Starling | CC0

Warkworth Hermitage: Open in the Summer

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit pam fray, CC BY-SA 2.0. English Heritage now manages Warkworth Hermitage together with the much larger Warkworth Castle a short distance away on the north bank of the Coquet. The hermitage opens to the public during the summer season. Access is, as it has always been, by water: a boatman carries visitor...

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Image: pam fray | CC BY-SA 2.0