There are stories all along the riverbanks, and one of the best is the story of Saint Godric, who ended his life near Finchale priory.

According to my Penguin Dictionary of Saints, Godric was born near Kings Lynn in Norfolk in 1065 (though that seems unlikely, since he lived until 1170), made a living as a pedlar and then went to sea where he became a wealthy trader. Reginald of Durham, who knew him, said that his early life was disorderly and his business methods dishonest - perhaps this is why he felt the need to go on several pilgrimages, and ultimately become a hermit.

Before he settled down, his pilgrimages took him to Jerusalem, Compostela and Saint Andrews. He walked, barefoot, to Rome, accompanied by his mother. In 1102, he just happened to be sailing down the coast of the Holy Land when the King of Jerusalem needed help to make his escape after his defeat at the battle of Ramleh, and was able to give him a lift.

Godric also wrote some of the earliest poetry in English: medieval biographies of him preserve four fragments of hymns, for which he apparently also composed the music: that makes him the first of the singer-songwriters (there's a tiny sample of his hymn to Saint Nicholas if you scroll far enough down this page).

Finchale is part of my personal story, too. My father spent his holidays there as a boy in the 1920s and 30s, in a wooden hut which his father had built. On one of his first visits after I had moved to Durham, he walked me along the river bank and showed me the location which they had known as the site of Godric's cell. You can't walk there now, as it's all blocked off by houses.