Just outside the stately stone of Edinburgh’s church heavy historic city is yet another church. This one has long been a pilgrimage destination but now attracts pilgrims of a new kind da da daaaa. The beautiful carvings, both Christian and Celtic Pagan, have been attracting visitors probably since the 15th Century when Rosslyn was built by the Roman Catholic Sinclair family. It took about 40 years to complete the carvings and many hours to decipher all their stories. There are guide notes about some of the more prominent carvings but there is so much more to look at. Some of the highlights are the six main pillars, each telling a story and the rather ghoulish Green Men, pagan symbols of growth and fertility, who poke their noses out of the strangest places charting over more than 100 faces the ageing of man with the seasons. The crypt is part of an older structure and is slightly eery because of it maybe. The Lady Chapel is from a different plan than the rest of the church but it all fits together nicely when carved so intricately all over. There is a larger crypt below the one you can enter but its been shut off for several hundred years and there doesn’t appear to be an entrance. This is where much of the rumour about there being something more to Rosslyn Chapel stem from. These rumours are mostly about the Knights Templar, the Masons and the Holy Grail, (Yes Dan Brown, we know you used it in your book.) but as yet nothing more than mystery and a lot of interesting carvings that could mean anything have been found.

Rosslyn Chapel Homepage.

Written by  Bill Mcdonnell.

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