Rosslyn Chapel: the unfinished medieval church whose carvings inspired a global conspiracy legend

In Roslin, in the Scottish Midlothian, Rosslyn Chapel was founded by William Sinclair, first Earl of Caithness, with a founding charter of 1446, although the actual building began, according to several sources, only on 20 September 1456. The chapel was conceived as a large collegiate church on a cruciform plan, but only the choir and the Lady Chapel above an earlier crypt were completed. The foundations of a nave and transepts that were never built, roughly 27 metres long, were found in excavations of the nineteenth century. The sources disagree on the exact year the founder died, placed variously between 1480 and 1484, an event commonly associated with the halt in the works. The interior is covered in stone carving of a density exceptional for its time, with biblical scenes, plant motifs and more than 110 figures of Green Men, according to the count kept by the trust that runs the chapel. The celebrated Apprentice Pillar takes its name from a legend documented only from the 18th century onwards. An apprentice stonemason is said to have carved it while his master was away, inspired by a dream, and the master, returning and consumed by envy at the superior work, is said to have killed him with a mallet: a folk tale, not documented history. Some carvings have been read by certain authors as depictions of New World plants, maize in particular, feeding speculative theories of pre-Columbian contact with the Americas. The analysis of the botanist Adrian Dyer concluded, however, that these are stylised decorative motifs that resemble those plants only by chance, and the «American» reading has no scientific consensus. In the same way, associations with Masonic or Templar symbolism, made famous by books such as «The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail» of 1982 and «The Da Vinci Code» of 2003, remain speculative ground: the chapel comes more than a century and a half after the suppression of the Templar order in 1312, and the earliest documented records of Masonic lodges in Scotland are later than its construction. The historian Robert L.D. Cooper has published research that specifically challenges these theories. A more recent theory, developed from the 2000s by the researchers Thomas and Stuart Mitchell, holds that some 213 carved cubes on the pillars and arches encode, through cymatic patterns, a musical composition they call the «Rosslyn Motet»: a specific research hypothesis, not an established historical fact. After the tourist boom that followed «The Da Vinci Code», the Rosslyn Chapel Trust carried out major conservation work between 1997 and 2013, costing around 13 million pounds, with a new visitor centre opening in 2011. The chapel remains today an active place of worship of the Scottish Episcopal Church, privately owned by the St Clair-Erskine family.