Rosslyn Chapel

Story

The Da Vinci Code sent millions to Rosslyn Chapel chasing Grail mythology. That rush of interest, which peaked at nearly 159,000 visitors in 2007–08, tends to flatten what's actually here into a backdrop for someone else's fiction. Set that aside. What William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, broke ground on in September 1456 is something stranger and more specific than any thriller can hold.

Sinclair's ambition was enormous — a cruciform collegiate church employing four to six ordained canons and boy choristers to sing the Liturgy of the Hours around the clock. Only the choir was ever finished. The nave's foundations, stretching 90 feet west, were recorded in the 19th century and then abandoned, leaving the chapel perpetually mid-sentence architecturally. Nobody knows why construction stopped. The original plans have never been found.

What did get built is dense with carving to a degree that feels almost anxious — as if every surface feared being left plain. More than 110 Green Men peer from pillars and arches, faces engulfed in stone foliage. Elsewhere, 213 cubes protrude from the stonework in patterns that no one has satisfactorily decoded. The chapel was bombed by suffragettes on 11 July 1914, stood semi-ruined through much of the 20th century, and spent fourteen years under a steel canopy while a £13 million conservation effort dried it out and stabilized its stone.

At the east end, three named pillars divide the nave from the Lady Chapel. The northernmost is the Master Pillar. The southernmost — the one everyone photographs — is the Apprentice Pillar, its surface wound with dragons at the base and spiraling foliage climbing upward. An 18th-century legend holds that the master mason, returning from Rome to find his apprentice had completed it without him, struck the boy dead with a mallet. The mason's face, according to the legend, was then carved into a corner to stare at his apprentice's work for eternity.