Rosslyn Chapel: carvings, symbols and the myths of Templars and Masons

A few kilometres south of Edinburgh, in the village of Roslin, stands a small Gothic church containing one of the densest sculptural schemes of medieval Scotland. Every surface of Rosslyn Chapel is covered with leaves, animals, musician angels, biblical figures and mysterious faces. This richness has fuelled countless interpretations over time, some grounded in the study of medieval art and devotion, others born in recent times and lacking any documentary support.

The Sinclair foundation

The chapel was founded in 1446 by Sir William Sinclair, the third and last Earl of Orkney of his line, as a collegiate church dedicated to Saint Matthew. In collegiate churches a group of priests said masses and prayers for the souls of the founder and his family, a practice very widespread in the late Middle Ages. The original plan probably envisaged a larger, cruciform church, but when the founder died in 1484 only the choir had been completed.

After the Reformation the chapel ceased to be used for Catholic worship and went through long periods of neglect. In the nineteenth century it was restored and returned to use as an Episcopal church. Among its illustrious visitors was Queen Victoria, who in 1842 expressed the wish that it be preserved. In recent decades extensive work has been carried out to consolidate the building and protect the carvings.

The Apprentice Pillar

The most famous pillar, in the eastern part, is wrapped in spiralling vines that rise from the base, where dragon figures coil. A legend, recorded at least from the eighteenth century, tells that the master mason went away to study a model of the pillar and that, in his absence, his apprentice carved it alone with extraordinary skill. On his return the master, blinded by envy, is said to have killed him with a blow of his mallet.

In the chapel two carved heads are still pointed out, one with a wound on its forehead, identified as the apprentice and the master. The story, with its variants, belongs to a type of tale found in many European cathedrals, in which the talent of a young craftsman arouses the jealousy of his superior. Its value is therefore more symbolic than historical.

Green men, exotic plants and modern myths

Among the carvings there are more than a hundred green men, faces from which leaves and branches sprout, a frequent motif in Gothic art linked to the idea of nature's renewal. Some authors have recognised in certain friezes ears of maize and aloe leaves, American plants, and inferred transatlantic voyages before Columbus. Art historians tend instead to read them as stylised plant motifs, and the question remains controversial.

The link with the Templars is even more problematic: the order had been suppressed between 1307 and 1312, more than a century before the foundation. The connections with Freemasonry, on the other hand, are partly historical, because in the seventeenth century the Sinclairs of Roslin were recognised as patrons of the Scottish masons, and in 1736 one of their descendants became the first Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Scotland. Its recent fame is also due to a best-selling novel of 2003.

Visited attentively, Rosslyn Chapel reveals above all the spiritual world of a fifteenth-century aristocratic family, with its fears for the afterlife, its devotion and its taste for magnificence. It is this authentic heritage, more than the secrets attributed to the chapel, that makes it one of the most fascinating places in Scotland.