Rosslyn Chapel
Rosslyn Chapel near Roslin in Midlothian is one of the most elaborately decorated medieval buildings in Scotland, a small fifteenth-century collegiate church whose extraordinary carved stonework covering virtually every internal surface with biblical scenes, foliage, figures and symbolic motifs has fascinated scholars, occultists and ordinary visitors for centuries. The chapel was built by William Sinclair, first Earl of Orkney, between 1446 and 1484, and the density and quality of its carved decoration, far exceeding anything else produced in Scotland in this period, reflects both the exceptional wealth of the Sinclair family and an ambition in stone carving that remains difficult to fully explain.
The chapel achieved worldwide celebrity with the publication of Dan Brown's novel The Da Vinci Code in 2003 and the subsequent film, both of which featured the chapel as the hiding place of the Holy Grail and wove an elaborate conspiracy narrative around its unusual decorative programme. The resulting surge of visitor interest transformed the chapel from a moderately visited Scottish heritage site into an internationally famous destination, bringing visitors from across the world who may or may not accept the novel's fictional framing but who find the chapel's extraordinary carved interior compelling for its genuine historical and artistic qualities.
The Apprentice Pillar, the most celebrated of the chapel's carved columns, is a pillar of extraordinary ornamental complexity whose spiral bands of intertwining foliage rise from its base to an elaborately carved capital. The legend attached to it, in which the master mason killed his apprentice in a rage of jealousy upon returning from Rome to find the pillar completed to a standard he could not have achieved himself, is a Victorian invention but captures something of the genuine wonder that the column produces in observers.
The surrounding Roslin Glen provides pleasant walking and the ruined Roslin Castle adds further medieval interest to the area.