Entries about rosslyn chapel

Anyone who read or saw The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown remembers Rosslyn Chapel. Brown's fictionalized account of the quest for the Holy Grail comes to a dramatic end at Rosslyn--the Rose Line. In fact, William St. Clair's family began building the Chapel in the mid 1400s and its intricate mason carvings of Christian symbols, Jewish stars, pagan faces, animals, an uncracked symbolic code, plants, vegetables, roses, and more have intrigued people ever since. No wonder mystical stories about the Chapel abound. The carvings suggest, as Brown noted, that the masons left a shrine to all faiths as well as to nature. So much here is inexplicable. For example, there are carvings of corn and of elephants, neither of which had ever been seen in Scotland in the 1400s. How did they know what they looked like? But the most fascinating fact is that there is a subterranean chamber underneath the Chapel. This is where, supposedly, the Holy Grail is, or was. It would be impossible to excavate the chamber without the Chapel crumbling. I love a good mystery.

Less than ten miles outside of Edinburgh, William St. Clair set the Chapel high on a hill near his home. If you take the public bus #37 from Princes Street in Edinburgh, you can easily get there without a car. There are mystical stories about how the Chapel was used as an astrological observatory as well as a direct line to aliens. How can you resist a place that has aliens, the Holy Grail, and a relationship to the secretive Knights Templar? Even if you are a skeptic, there is still a murder that is well-documented. A master mason left an apprentice in charge of one of the columns while he went off to a workshop to improve his craft. The apprentice had a vision and carved an intricate, spiraling masterpiece. When the master returned, he was infuriated and killed the apprentice. Their heads are memorialized in carvings in the Chapel, as is the head of the grieving mother of the dead apprentice. The Apprentice's Pillar is amazing.

None of the masons names are known, but their work is stunning. It is possible to spend hours inside this small Chapel and you will never see all of the hundreds of carvings. Unfortunately, no indoor photography is permitted. It is only due to Dan Brown's book and the subsequent movie, that the Chapel is going to survive. Since the book was published in 2003, the publicity has brought hundreds of thousands of tourists and the money has been used for continual conservation of this tiny treasure that still belongs to the Sinclair family. Find more at www.rosslynchapel.com