Legend
The Nun's Grave
Buried before the altar she knelt at.
Stand where it happened
- What's there
- An old sandstone cross in a ring of trees
- Legend from
- Local legend; J. H. Cooke's 1912 novel
- Best time
- Any
- Tone
- Melancholy
Where the high altar stood, a nun who loved an abbot is said to lie.
In the grounds of Vale Royal Abbey stands a stone monument known as the Nun's Grave. Legend says it marks the burial place of Sister Ida, a 14th-century nun from Chester who came to nurse the sick abbot. The pair are said to have fallen in love, and she was allowed to be buried before the high altar. The Cheshire HER describes it as a cross made from pieces of different dates, standing roughly where the altar was. A local historian, Brian Curzon, argues that Ida was invented in a novel of 1912, written by John Henry Cooke, who misread 'Nunsgreave' on an old map. That name, he says, really meant Nun's Grove.