Seem’d all on fire that chapel proud,
Where Roslin’s chiefs uncoffin’d lie,
Each Baron, for a sable shroud,
Sheathed in his iron panoply….

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Blazed battlement and pinnet high,
Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair–
So still they blaze, when fate is nigh
The lordly line of high Saint Clair.

Other visitors have included painters J.M.W. Turner and Alexander Nasmyth; and writers Robert Burns, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The latter recorded her impressions of the chapel, writing in 1803, The stone both of the roof and walls is sculptured with leaves and flowers, / so delicately wrought that I could have admired them for hours. Her brother William, for his part, wrote a sonnet in 1831 titled Composed in Rosslyn Chapel During a Storm.

The chapel that so impressed Wordsworth in 1831 had been severely buffeted by the winds of religious change over the previous centuries. As a Catholic institution it faced destruction during the Scottish Reformation; its altars were demolished in 1592. Oliver Cromwell had his men stable their horses in the chapel in 1650 when he and General George Monck conquered nearby Rosslyn Castle. In 1688 a mob from Edinburgh attacked this symbol of papistry and inflicted more damage. Minor repairs were made in 1736, but the chapel was not rededicated until 1862. During World War II an overzealous local official recommended closing the chapel as an austerity measure. In response, the minister of fuel wrote back, I doubt whether I would be justified in securing a small economy of fuel in this world at the possible cost of a disproportionate expenditure of it on myself in the next. So the chapel survived even a bureaucratic assault.

Today Rosslyn Chapel is an ever-more-popular tourist attraction, helped in part by the many legends that surround it. The whole joy of Rosslyn is that it has almost as many stories as you care to think of, Beattie told me. Every image and every carving and every reason to bring you here is different to someone else. It’s an enigma, and that’s what makes it so exciting.

Like the heroes of The Da Vinci Code, I discovered that there is definitely a coverup going on at Rosslyn–but a nonmystical one. It began in 1997, when workers erected a huge metal canopy over the entire building. The stones had absorbed water over the centuries, explained Beattie, who compared the building to a sponge that needed to be wrung out. The initial fear was that rainwater was causing damage, particularly since rain contains ever-increasing amounts of acid that eats away at the stone. What we’ve subsequently found is that the water in the stonework is more the result of condensation than it is ingress, and so it’s a different sort of water to deal with and, in many ways, less scary, Beattie said. So the situation we find ourselves in at the moment is that the chapel is drying markedly. [But] if you then take the canopy away and expose the stone that has been dry for six or seven years to the elements again, you have a continuing problem. The canopy could be up until 2007, although Beattie expects it to come down sooner. In the meantime, although the structure does detract from the chapel’s aesthetic impact, it also allows visitors to climb up and see the gothic superstructure.

After talking with Beattie, I set out to explore the building. Although only about 40 feet wide and 70 feet long, not including the baptistery, the chapel is wonderfully atmospheric–cool and dim and hushed. It’s not a place to rush through. There are stories about all the various carvings, and my guidebook, written by the current earl of Rosslyn, pointed out many details that would otherwise have escaped me. For example, I learned about a mistake some long-forgotten stone worker made when he carved the seven virtues and the seven deadly sins–he placed avarice among the virtues and charity among the sins. The most likely explanation, the book stated, is that when the stones of the architrave were carved in the workshop, the two scenes were carved on the wrong sides of their common stone. The stone could fit only one way, so the mason had to make do.

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