Rosamund is believed to have been the daughter of Walter de Clifford, a marcher lord who owned a castle on the River Rye in Herefordshire. As she grew to womanhood word of her beauty spread far and wide, attracting the eye of the king.

She was educated at Godstow Nunnery and after King Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine, Rosamund retired to Godstow Abbey to live out the rest of her short life as a nun, dying young before she reached her 30th birthday.

Apparently, she was held in such high regard that she was buried in front of the high altar in the abbey church. When the Bishop of Lincoln visited Godstow a decade later in 1191, he found the tomb still covered with a pall of silk and surrounded by candles.

Shocked that the tomb of a woman he considered 'a harlot' was still being honoured in this way, the bishop ordered her body to be removed and reburied outside the church.

Rosamund's ghost is said to be still occasionally seen flitting about between the stone ruins that are all that remains of Godstow Nunnery today. Her ghost is also reported to haunt The Trout Inn which stands just across the bridge from the ruins, and where while still a nun at Godstow, Rosamund was said to have met King Henry for illicit trysts.

In his book Haunted Oxford, Rob Walters recounts a local belief that if you go to the ruins of Godstow Nunnery at sunrise on May Morning, you will hear the ghostly sound of nuns singing or chanting as they would have done many hundreds of years previously.

According to a local legend, apparently well known in the 1940s, the abbey ruins at Godstow was once home to a witch who would demand a toll of anyone passing by the ruins. If anyone was foolish enough to refuse to pay her toll, she would curse them with madness, sickness or both! The story says that the locals eventually turned on the witch and dragged her into the centre of Oxford to be burned at the stake. However, with her dying breath the witch cursed her captors, turning them into geese who fled back to Port Meadow.

My source for this is Reg Hargreaves excellent website The Godstow Witch, in which Reg explores the legend of the witch and contrasts it with a number of historical accounts that may have inspired it. While Reg debunks a number of myths about the story, such as the idea that the 'witch' may have previously been a nun, he also uncovers a wealth of intriguing evidence that may have fueled the fires of folklore. These include a report of a "witch's broomstick" found walled up in an Oxford pub and a German traveler who, in 1710, met a "filthy old hag" at Godstow who showed him "Satan's room" in the abbey ruins!

When the Abbey at Godstow was dissolved by Henry VIII in the mid-16th century, the Abbess and a number of nuns were said to have left Oxfordshire and fled to Cheshire. According to an article that appeared in the Oxford Journal on 26 November 1904, Abbess lived for a time at the Rectory in Cheadle, Cheshire, where she died 'of a broken heart' in 1559. Her ghost is said to haunt the Rectory.

The article quotes the Rev. Macdona, who had lived at the Rectory for 21 years at time of the article. The Rev. stated that, while he had not himself seen the ghost, his sister-in-law had seen it and described it merely as 'the figure of a women'. He went on to say that servants often reported strange noises in the house, including that old chestnut, the rustling of a silk dress!