Rosslyn Chapel, Roslin

The chapel above Roslin Glen in Midlothian, dedicated to Saint Matthew the Evangelist and also known as the Collegiate Chapel of Saint Matthew, was founded by William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, of the Scoto-Norman Sinclair family. It was the third Sinclair place of worship at Roslin. The first stood within Roslin Castle, and the second, whose crumbling buttresses can still be seen, occupied what is now Roslin Cemetery. The founding charter permitting a collegiate chapel came from Rome in 1446, and the ground was broken with a ceremony in 1456. The two are often confused: the start of construction has often been recorded as 1446, the year of the charter, while the building work itself is dated to 20 September 1456.

Sinclair established the college so that the Liturgy of the Hours could be celebrated throughout the day and night, and so that Catholic Masses could be said for all the faithful departed, the dead of his own family among them. The college was founded with between four and six ordained canons and two boy choristers, and the singing of the liturgy drew on both plainsong, a single melodic line, and polyphony, or vocal harmony. Sinclair provided an endowment to support the priests and choristers in perpetuity. He was himself buried in the choir of the chapel he had founded.

No original plans for Rosslyn have ever been found or recorded, so whether the chapel was intended to stand in its present layout remains open to speculation. The building was designed to be cruciform and was never completed. Only the choir was constructed, together with the retro-chapel, otherwise called the Lady chapel, which was raised on a much earlier crypt, the Lower Chapel, believed to form part of an earlier castle on the site. The foundations of the nave and transepts that were never raised, stretching to a distance of 90 feet, were recorded in the 19th century, and construction of them was abandoned. The Lower Chapel is a separate space from the burial vaults that lie underneath the chapel. Rosslyn's architecture is considered to be among the finest in Scotland.

Three pillars stand at the east end of the chapel, dividing the nave from the Lady chapel, and are named from north to south the Master Pillar, the Journeyman Pillar and the Apprentice Pillar. In a document of 1778, An Account of the Chapel of Roslin, the last of them was called the Prince's Pillar; the name shifted over time under the pull of a legend that dates from the 18th century. In that story the master mason in charge of the stonework did not believe his young apprentice could carve the complicated column without seeing the original that had inspired the design. He travelled to see it himself, and on his return was enraged to find that the apprentice had completed the column alone. In a fit of jealous anger he struck the apprentice on the head with his mallet and killed him, and as punishment for the crime his own face was carved into the opposite corner, to gaze forever on his apprentice's pillar. The architrave joining the pillar carries an inscription from the third and fourth chapters of 1 Esdras, Forte est vinum fortior est rex fortiores sunt mulieres super omnia vincit veritas: wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but truth conquers all. A full-size plaster cast of the pillar and the adjacent bay of the chapel was made in 1871 and is held in the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The Scottish Reformation of 1560 brought Catholic worship in the chapel to an end, and its altars were destroyed in 1592. After the Reformation the building was largely abandoned. When James St Clair-Erskine, 2nd Earl of Rosslyn, died in 1837, his wish was to be buried in the original Sinclair vault beneath the chapel; exhaustive searches carried out over the course of a week found no entrance to it, and he was buried beside his wife in the Lady Chapel instead.

In 1842 the chapel, by then ruined and overgrown, was visited by Queen Victoria, who expressed a desire that it should be preserved. Restoration work was carried out in 1862 by David Bryce on behalf of James Alexander, 3rd Earl of Rosslyn. The chapel was rededicated on 22 April 1862, and from that point Sunday services were held there once again, now under the jurisdiction of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

On 11 July 1914 a bomb exploded inside the building. The attack formed part of the suffragette bombing and arson campaign of 1912 to 1914, in which suffragettes carried out a series of politically motivated bombings and arson attacks nationwide as part of their campaign for women's suffrage. Churches were a particular target of that campaign, on the belief that the Church of England was complicit in reinforcing opposition to women's suffrage, and 32 churches were attacked across the country between 1913 and 1914. In the weeks leading up to the explosion at Roslin there had been bombings at Westminster Abbey and St Paul's Cathedral.

The interior contains fine carvings that many historians have sought to interpret. Among them is a sequence of 213 cubes, or boxes, protruding from the pillars and arches, each carrying a selection of patterns. It is unknown whether those patterns have any particular meaning attached to them; many people have attempted to find information coded into them, and no interpretation has yet proven conclusive. Many of the boxes are not original, having been replaced in the 19th century after erosion damage. One recent attempt reads them as a musical score, on the grounds that the motifs somewhat resemble the geometric Chladni patterns studied in cymatics. By matching those patterns with the musical notes corresponding to the same frequencies, the father-and-son team of Thomas and Stuart Mitchell produced a tune that Stuart calls the Rosslyn Motet.

More than 110 carvings of Green Men are found in and around the chapel, including one in the Lady chapel between the two middle altars of the east wall. Other carvings depict plants, among them wheat, strawberries and lilies. Robert Lomas and Christopher Knight have hypothesised that some of these represent ears of new world corn, or maize, a plant unknown in Europe at the time the chapel was built, and in their book they describe meeting the wife of the botanist Adrian Dyer, who told them that Dyer agreed the image thought to be maize was accurate. Dyer in fact found only one identifiable plant among the botanical carvings, and suggested that the supposed maize and aloe were stylised wooden patterns that resembled real plants only by coincidence.

The chapel has been a burial place for several generations of Sinclairs, and a crypt was once reached by a descending stair at the rear. That crypt has been sealed shut for many years, which may explain the recurrent legends that it is merely a front to a more extensive subterranean vault holding, variously, the mummified head of Jesus Christ, the Holy Grail, the treasure of the Templars, or the original crown jewels of Scotland. Since the late 1980s the chapel has been the subject of speculative theories connecting it with the Knights Templar, the Holy Grail and Freemasonry, a role in which it featured prominently in Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003 and adapted for film in 2006. Medieval historians say these accounts have no basis in fact.

The Rosslyn Chapel Trust was established in 1995 to oversee the building's conservation and its opening as a sightseeing destination. An extensive programme of conservation ran between 1997 and 2013, taking in the roof, the stone, the carvings, the stained glass and the organ. A steel canopy was erected over the chapel roof and stood there for fourteen years, both to prevent further rain damage and to give the building a chance to dry out properly. Three human skeletons were found during the restoration. The last major scaffolding was removed in August 2010, and major stonework repairs were completed by the end of 2011. The rooftop pinnacles drew particular interest during renovation work in 2010: nesting jackdaws had made them unstable, and dismantling them brick by brick revealed a chamber the stonemasons had built specifically to harbour bees. The hive, by then abandoned, was sent to local beekeepers to identify.

A new visitor centre opened in July 2011. The stained-glass windows and the organ were fully restored, and new lighting and heating were installed. The expected cost of the restoration work is around 13 million pounds, with about 3.7 million pounds of that spent on the visitor centre. Funding came from various sources including the Heritage Lottery Fund, Historic Scotland and the environmental body WREN, and the actor Tom Hanks also made a donation.

Photography and video have been forbidden inside the chapel since 2008, and commercially produced photographs are sold in its shop. In 2006 the historian Louise Yeoman criticised the Rosslyn Chapel Trust for cashing in on the popularity of The Da Vinci Code, against better knowledge. In the financial year 2013 to 2014 the chapel recorded 144,823 visitors, the highest number since 2007 to 2008, when at the height of the popular interest induced by the novel the figure came close to 159,000. The chapel has been a category A listed building since January 1971. It remains privately owned, and the current owner is Peter St Clair-Erskine, 7th Earl of Rosslyn.