The Bell of Brinkburn

Among Chambers’s bell legends is one from Brinkburn, a priory hidden in a wooded cleft of the Coquet and invisible from the high ground round it. A foraging party of Scots moss-troopers searched for it in vain and were leaving when the monks, thinking the danger past, rang their bell for a service of thanks. The Scots heard it, turned back, plundered the priory and set it on fire. In the half century before Chambers wrote, old people pointed out a tree under which treasure was said to be buried, and what was dug up proved to be pieces of the priory bell.