Rosslyn is still a working chapel, and at noon I listened to a reading of some of the prayers visitors have written in a book kept there. The simple ceremony was quite moving. I experienced another haunting interlude when a tour guide sang some kind of hymn or chant in the sacristy–a bare, arched, chilly space below ground level. As his voice echoed around the sacristy and up into the chapel, the effect was truly spine-tingling.

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Another time I watched two older men stand at opposite ends of a memorial to a former countess of Rosslyn. They closed their eyes, raised their arms toward each other, then slowly lowered their arms. They laughed as they left the chapel, and I didn’t know if they had been in earnest or not. Maybe I had witnessed some strange ritual of the Knights Templar.The Templars–officially the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon–were founded around 1120 to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. In Jerusalem the order made its headquarters atop Temple Mount, where Herod the Great had erected his temple on the site where Solomon built his earlier one to house the ark of the covenant. There, according to the legends, the Templars found a number of wonderful relics. Supposedly Herod’s Temple held secrets of the time of Christ, Beattie explained, and may have had–and that’s the word that runs all the way through Rosslyn’s history: ‘may, perhaps, possibly’–the ark of the covenant, bits of the true cross, maybe the mummified head of Christ, Holy Grail. You go for it; if they were there, they should have been in that building.

Muslim opponents finally forced the Templars out of the Holy Land in 1291, and some speculate that the Knights took their sacred relics with them. They did become a very rich and powerful order, so much so that Pope Clement V and King Philip IV of France combined to crush them in 1307. Some Templars fled to Scotland. William St. Clair was allegedly a Templar Grandmaster, so it’s possible he gained possession of relics from Solomon’s Temple and hid them away in a secret vault somewhere on the chapel grounds. Earlier last year a Scottish group of Knights Templar began advocating for noninvasive searches to find evidence of such vaults. Beattie assured me there were no plans to attempt anything of that sort. Besides, he asked with tongue slightly in cheek, what if they did find holy relics? How could they handle the crowds? Our car park’s not big enough.

Others see links to Freemasonry in the carvings–some of the stone angels appear to be making hand gestures with Masonic meaning. Yet Freemasonry did not reach Scotland until sometime around the mid-18th century. Beattie suggested that the Masonic carvings could have been introduced around that time. Or not. Equally, you could perhaps suggest that maybe Freemasonry and the Templars have some sort of generic link. I don’t think either would be particularly happy with that. Wherever the eye passes in Rosslyn Chapel it lights upon a carving or pillar, boss or symbolic image with a story behind it. The whole is a visual crossword puzzle for which there is no key.

On an arch around a window on the chapel’s south side I spotted other intriguing carvings–rows of what certainly looked like corn, a vegetable that was unknown in Europe until after Christopher Columbus’ return from the New World. But work had ended here before Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Could these carvings mean that someone with links to Rosslyn reached the New World before Columbus did? Indeed they do, according to some theories. In 1398 Henry St. Clair, the 42nd Earl of Orkney and grandfather of the chapel’s founder, may have explored Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, traveled as far south as Massachusetts and wintered in North America. The story comes from the so-called Zeno Manuscript, an account of the voyage written by a Venetian whose great-great-great grandfather had supposedly traveled with St. Clair. And meanwhile, in Westford, Mass., there’s a rock with markings that some interpret as the depiction of a 14th-century knight–a memorial to one of Henry’s men, they say, who died there.

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