Rosslyn Chapel

Summary

A Category A listed collegiate church in the village of Roslin, Midlothian, Scotland, with groundbreaking on 20 September 1456 for William Sinclair, 3rd Earl of Orkney; comprising a choir with north and south aisles, a Lady chapel, and a sacristy; notable for its Apprentice Pillar, extensive Green Man carvings, and possible representations of New World plants predating European contact; now a functioning Scottish Episcopal Church under the care of the Earl of Rosslyn; used as a filming location for The Da Vinci Code (2006) and associated with numerous popular historical theories concerning the Knights Templar and the Holy Grail.

About this location

Rosslyn Chapel, formally the Collegiate Church of St Matthew, stands in the village of Roslin in Midlothian, approximately seven miles south of Edinburgh. Construction began on 20 September 1456, as recorded in the foundation documents, under the patronage of William Sinclair, 3rd Earl of Orkney and 1st Earl of Caithness. Sinclair intended the chapel as part of a much larger collegiate church that was never completed; the surviving building comprises the choir with north and south aisles, the Lady chapel at the east end, and a sacristy below the south aisle. The west wall, where a nave would have joined, remains unfinished with the wall-heads left rough.

The interior is densely carved throughout, with approximately 110 Green Man heads — faces from which foliage sprouts — thought to be among the highest concentrations of this motif in any single building in the world. The Apprentice Pillar at the south-east corner of the Lady chapel is the most celebrated single element: a spiral column with elaborate interlaced foliage rising from the base, distinguished from the plainer Mason’s Pillar opposite it. According to a post-medieval legend, the apprentice carved the pillar while the master mason was abroad, and the master, on returning and seeing the work surpassing his own, killed the apprentice in a rage. A carved head near the pillar is identified in tradition as the murdered apprentice.

Some carvings in the chapel have been proposed as representations of plants including maize and aloe that are native to the Americas and would not have been known to European carvers before 1492. This interpretation is disputed by scholars, who suggest the carvings more plausibly represent stylised native European plants. The chapel also incorporates engrailed cross motifs from the Sinclair heraldry and carvings associated with Freemasonry.

The building passed through periods of neglect and damage. During the Reformation it was attacked by a mob who destroyed the altars; the interior was left roofless and open for approximately a century and a half before restoration began in the 17th century under James Sinclair, 11th Earl of Rosslyn. Later restoration and consolidation work was carried out in the late 19th century and again in the 1990s and 2000s, when a temporary roof shelter was erected while the stone dried out.

The chapel features prominently in popular culture through Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (2003), in which it appears as the location of the Holy Grail. The Da Vinci Code (Columbia/Sony, 2006, directed by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks as Robert Langdon and Audrey Tautou as Sophie Neveu) filmed sequences at Rosslyn Chapel itself, making it one of the most visited tourist destinations in Scotland in the years following the film’s release. The chapel is a functioning place of worship under the Scottish Episcopal Church and is under the custodianship of the Earl of Rosslyn.