Rosslyn Chapel

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Vines spill from the mouths of stone faces at Rosslyn — more than a hundred Green Men, inside the building and out, the old emblem of death flowering back into life repeated until the masonry itself seems about to leaf. Foliage climbs the ribs and crowds the capitals of the five-bay choir; a heavenly concert of carved angels plays beneath the pointed stone vault, one cherub working a set of bagpipes; and along the arches of the Lady Chapel, above thirteen angel musicians, 213 small carved cubes stand out from the stone in patterns too deliberate to be mere ornament and too irregular to be obviously anything else. The room has been read like a book — by mourners, ministers, mobs, poets, Freemasons, botanists, and novelists — for close to six hundred years.

What all those readers are reading is the choir of an unfinished church. William Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, founded the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew by a charter of 1446 — the date the chapel itself keeps — with the dedication following in 1450; there the record frays honestly, for Historic Environment Scotland’s listing has the church established in 1450 and made collegiate in 1524, while one strand of the site record dates the start of construction to 20 September 1456. The purpose, at least, is not in doubt. A college of a provost, six prebendaries, and two choristers was endowed to sing the daily office and pray the founder’s soul through purgatory: in the chantry economy of the late Middle Ages, the singing was the machinery of salvation, and the carving was its setting. Sinclair planned a full cruciform church; what rose was the chancel alone, with its eastern Lady Chapel raised over a lower crypt, and the foundations of the unbuilt nave, found again in the nineteenth century, lie scheduled beneath the grass. The founder died in 1484 and was buried in his chapel; his son Sir Oliver roofed the choir with its ribbed stone barrel vault and built no further. The carvers themselves, romantically reported as Spaniards or Portuguese, probably came on from work at Borthwick Castle.

The Reformation silenced the college. Its endowments were seized in 1571 and the provost and prebendaries forced out; in 1592 Oliver St Clair was ordered to destroy the altars of a building denounced as “a house and monument of idolatrie,” and worship ceased. Cromwell’s troopers stabled their horses in the chapel in 1650 while battering Rosslyn Castle, and spared the building; that same year Sir William Sinclair, killed at the Battle of Dunbar, was lowered into the vault below in full armor after the custom of his house — the last knight buried so. The vault kept its legends well. John Slezer’s Theatrum Scotiae (1693) records three Earls of Orkney and nine Barons of Roslin beneath the floor, the barons armored in a vault so dry their bodies endured entire after eighty years, and a chapel that “appears all in Fire” on the night before a death in the family — a death-omen of the classic Scottish kind. On 11 December 1688 a mob out of Edinburgh, joined by Roslin villagers, broke in and defaced the “popish” furnishings and the Earl of Caithness’s tomb — the episode set down in the family record of Father Richard Augustine Hay. Not until 1736 did Sir James Sinclair glaze the windows for the first time, relay the floor in flagstone, and mend the roof.

The poets reopened the building. Dorothy and William Wordsworth visited on 17 September 1803, and William left a sonnet, “Composed at Roslin Chapel during a Storm”; Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) set the blazing-chapel omen in verse and made the ruin famous. Queen Victoria drove over from Dalkeith Palace on 14 September 1842 and recorded the chapel in her journal as “in an excellent state of preservation,” with twenty barons of Rosslyn buried there in armor. Restoration followed in 1861–62 under David Bryce for the 3rd Earl of Rosslyn; on 22 April 1862 the Episcopal Bishop of Edinburgh rededicated the building, and Sunday worship resumed after some 270 years in the Scottish Episcopal Church, in which the chapel still serves. Andrew Kerr added a west baptistery with an organ loft in 1880–81 for the 4th Earl, and the chapel remains in the private hands of the Earl and Countess of Rosslyn.

Fame brought exegesis. Around one window arch in the Lady Chapel run carvings popularly identified as maize — Indian corn — and elsewhere as aloe, plants no fifteenth-century Scottish mason had seen; on those identifications rests the claim that Henry Sinclair, 1st Earl of Orkney and the founder’s grandfather, crossed the Atlantic around 1398, before Columbus. The documentary trail tells a tighter story. The voyage rests on the Zeno narrative, published in Venice in 1558, whose prince “Zichmni” was equated with Henry Sinclair only in the 1780s by John Reinhold Forster, an equation carried to a wide public by Frederick Pohl in 1974 and Andrew Sinclair in 1992; the carvings themselves were first called maize in Will Grant’s guidebook of 1947, earlier guidebooks finding nothing American in them. The botanist Adrian Dyer examined the plants in 1999 and found them stylized and botanically inaccurate, the “maize” probably derived from patterns in wood; the archaeobotanist Brian Moffat suggested a stylized arum lily.

The cubes received the boldest reading of all. In 2005–07 Thomas J. Mitchell and his son Stuart matched the carved patterns to the vibration figures of Chladni plates and announced that the 213 cubes encode a piece of music, performed in 2007 as “The Rosslyn Motet.” The critics’ brief is equally specific: only a partial note-mapping was published; the reconstruction requires heavy artistic license; the arches give no reading order, stranding whole strings of notes; runs of nine identical cubes resist musical sense; and no one has established that every cube is fifteenth-century work rather than nineteenth-century restoration. On that accounting the motet was composed, not decoded.

The Sinclair claim on the masons of Scotland, by contrast, is a matter of record. Two documents, of about 1601 and about 1628 — the first issued with the consent of William Schaw, the king’s master of works — were drawn up in the name of the deacons, masters, and freemen of the masons of Scotland, declaring that the lairds of Roslin had “ever bene patrones and protectors of ws and our previleges.” David Stevenson’s standard account reads the St Clair charters as bids for a judicial patronage of the working craft; the title “Grand Master” appears nowhere in them. It was the eighteenth century that made the patronage hereditary and grand: in 1736 William St Clair of Roslin, last of his line, formally resigned the old family claim and was elected, on St Andrew’s Day, the first Grand Master Mason of the new Grand Lodge of Scotland — whose founding story then made the lairds of Roslin hereditary Grand Masters retrospectively.

The Templar and Grail readings are younger still. The Knights Templar were suppressed by 1314, in the long aftermath of the Crusades — 132 years before William Sinclair’s charter — and no document connects the order to the building. Books made the connection instead: eighteenth-century antiquarian speculation, nineteenth-century romance, then The Hiram Key (1996), in which Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas presented the chapel as a copy of Solomon’s Temple with scrolls sealed beneath it, and the modern writers who moved the Holy Grail itself into the Apprentice Pillar or the unopened vaults. Dan Brown staged the finale of The Da Vinci Code (2003) at Rosslyn — “the most mysterious and magical chapel on earth,” the novel calls it — and film crews shot the interiors on site in September 2005, the aerial views using a one-sixth scale model of the scaffold-wrapped building. Around 38,000 people a year visited before the novel; nearly 80,000 after it; more than 176,000 at the peak after the film; a stage adaptation toured Scotland in 2022. The vaults, for the record, remain sealed — no excavation of them has ever been permitted — and the legends rest untested beneath the floor.

Slurry, canopy, counter-archive

The scaffolding had a cause worth recording. In 1954 the Ministry of Works coated the interior carvings with a cementitious slurry meant to protect them; it blurred the detail and sealed moisture into the stone, and undoing that one decision has defined the chapel’s modern care. A 1995 condition report found green algae growing on the interior surfaces; the Rosslyn Chapel Trust was formed that year, and from March 1997 a free-standing steel canopy stood over the whole building until the summer of 2010, drying the roof slowly. The Conservation and Access Project that followed — £9.3 million in all, anchored by a £4.9 million Heritage Lottery Fund award with £1.6 million from Historic Scotland — re-covered the roofs in lead, conserved stone, mortar, and stained glass across a four-year external program, restored the organ, and opened a visitor center in 2012; the Heritage Fund’s record of the completion in September 2013 marks the first scaffold-free sight of the chapel since 1997 and notes that Da Vinci Code visitor income materially funded the rescue. The custodians have been as exacting with the legends as with the stone. The Trust published Rose McCandless and Fiona Rogan’s “A Voyage to the New World, or A Tall Tale!” (Rosslyn Chapel Trust, 2020), a critical anatomy of the Henry Sinclair voyage myth, against its own most lucrative story; George Thomson’s peer-reviewed study in Bradleya 39 (2021) concluded that the supposed aloes “are not illustrations of Aloe vera” but abstract decorative features; David Stevenson’s The Origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s Century, 1590–1710 (Cambridge University Press, 1988) set the St Clair charters on their documentary footing; and Robert L. D. Cooper, curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland Museum and Library, answered the bestsellers point by point in The Rosslyn Hoax? (Lewis Masonic, 2006). The nineteenth century’s own restoration argument became public property in March 2022, when Historic Environment Scotland acquired the John Britton collection of drawings, manuscripts, and engravings, Walter Scott among the correspondents.

One pillar outranks all this paper. At the southeast corner of the Lady Chapel stands a reeded shaft wound about by four bands of foliage spiraling through half a turn, dragonish beasts at its base. The master mason appointed to carve it traveled abroad to study the model at first hand; in his absence his apprentice raised the pillar himself; and the master, returning to find the work finished and beyond him, killed the boy in his jealousy. Thomas Kirk heard the story on his Scottish tour of 1677 — “his apprentice had built one pillar which exceeded all that ever he could do … therefore he slew him” — and was already shown the witnesses in stone: on the walls above, the carved head of the apprentice with the gash in his forehead, and the head of the master who struck him down. Slezer tried “Prince’s Pillar” in 1693, naming it for the founder, and the name did not take. The pillar belongs to the apprentice — the one carver at Rosslyn whose work exceeded all that his master could do, who paid for the exceeding with his life, and whose gashed head has watched over his pillar longer than any earl held the land it stands on.

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