Rosslyn Chapel

Sir William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, founded the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew at Roslin in 1446. Forty years of carving followed. The interior — every pillar, boss, archstone, and capital crowded with foliage, angels, beasts, biblical scenes and faces — is unique in Britain.

Among the foliage are forms some have read as American maize and aloe. If the readings hold, they were carved decades before Columbus, and have fed claims of pre-Columbian Sinclair voyages — most prominently the 1398 expedition of Henry Sinclair, Earl of Orkney, supposedly to Nova Scotia. The botanical readings are contested by botanists; the voyage is contested by historians; the carvings remain.

The Apprentice Pillar, in the south-east of the chapel, bears the chapel's most famous story. The master mason had travelled to Rome to study the design. In his absence the apprentice carved the pillar from a dream. On the master's return he saw what the apprentice had made and killed him with a mallet. The apprentice's face — and the master's — are carved among the corbels above.

Templar and Masonic associations have been read into Rosslyn since the 19th century and exhaustively in the 21st, after the chapel's appearance in The Da Vinci Code. The Sinclair family did have a documented role in the Scottish freemasonic tradition. The Templar claims are weaker. The chapel itself — the carving, the strangeness, the standing weight of intent — is what the visitors come back for.