History of Rosslyn
Rosslyn Chapel
Rosslyn Chapel. The scaffolding is part of a conservation project to allow the stones to dry out naturally. Photo: Thomas Duesing ©
Officially known as The Collegiate Church of St Matthew the Apostle, Rosslyn Chapel has intoxicated every visitor, especially the writers of poetry and fiction - from Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth in the nineteenth century to the novelist Dan Brown in the twenty-first.
What makes Rosslyn Chapel unique is that it stands in Roslin Glen, a river channel hidden by towering trees and steep with twisted rock faces. It is an environment that is managed by a number of agencies such as Scottish Natural Heritage and the Scottish Wildlife Trust, a nature reserve protected for its ancient unspoilt habitats.
Rosslyn Chapel was built in the mid-15th century by William Sinclair, first Earl of Caithness. The Sinclairs are descended from Norman knights. Rosslyn was founded as a Roman Catholic collegiate church; today it is a church in the Scottish Episcopalian tradition and still functions as a working church, in spite of the great numbers of tourists who flock to Roslin Glen simply to gaze in wonder at the Chapel, Castle and Glen, searching for spiritual healing in one form or another.
History of Rosslyn
Rosslyn Castle ruins. Photo: Supergolden ©
What most visitors do not appreciate is that there are three Rosslyn Chapels. The first chapel nestled inside Rosslyn Castle within a curious curved stone wall known as the 'rounds', resembling a honeycomb. Two ruined stone buttresses in Roslin's graveyard are all that is left of the second chapel. Construction of the third chapel began in the 1440s on a hill overlooking both its predecessors and lasted forty years.
Sir William founded the Chapel to offer prayers for his ancestors and his descendants and for all mankind. He had had an active life, lived in obedience to his God and to his King, and wanted to ensure that he would reap an eternal reward after death. He established a financial trust that would pay for priests and singing boys to praise the Lord in perpetuity.
Building a collegiate church beside Rosslyn Castle was a way of getting some of the spiritual benefits of a large monastery without the enormous construction this required and the expensive manpower that a big community of monks needed.
The Collegiate Church of St Matthew was intended to be a much larger, cross-shaped building. By the time its founder Sir William Sinclair died, and was buried in the unfinished choir section, his son Sir Oliver Sinclair appears to have either lost interest or run out of money - perhaps the fashion for collegiate churches had simply ended.
Rosslyn Castle, painted by Thomas Bond Walker ©
For whatever reason, the larger building was never finished: Sir Oliver did no more than add a roof to the choir, which became the entire building. 19th-century excavation work reportedly showed that the foundations laid according to the original plans extend some 91 feet (around 28m) beyond the existing west wall.
At the Reformation (1560) the Chapel was closed for public worship and the Sinclair family forced to break down the altars and discard the carved saints of the old Catholic faith. It was not until 1861 that Rosslyn Chapel opened again for public worship, this time in the Scottish Episcopal tradition. It continues today as an Episcopal church.
Fr Richard Hay
Almost everything we know about Rosslyn Chapel and the Sinclair family goes back to the historical records written down by Fr Richard Augustine Hay (1661-1736/7). Hay, baptised a Protestant, lost his father and his mother married into the still-Roman Catholic Sinclair family. Hay studied to be a priest at the Scots College in Paris and then was ordained as a priest in the Augustinian Order.
Rosslyn Chapel, courtesy of Michael Turnbull
Aside from preaching, celebrating Mass and hearing confessions, baptising, marrying and anointing the dying, taking funerals and all the other things priests might be expected to do, his great interest in life was making sure that precious family charters and their contents were preserved. He did this by copying charters and, as a member of the important Sinclair family, he was given privileged access to the private papers of his and other families.
None of these original charters survived (some were so old and damaged by long use that they would have been copied and re-copied) - although, curiously, a charter recording gifts of land to the canons of Rosslyn Chapel recently came up for sale on an auction site but failed to reach its reserve.
Hence, the manuscripts of Fr Richard Augustine Hay, preserved in the National Library of Scotland, form the main source for the history of the Sinclairs and of Rosslyn Chapel.
Door to Rosslyn Chapel ©
Writers and artists
Many writers, painters, photographers and poets have found beauty and inspiration at Rosslyn. Among these were the writers and poets Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, William Wordsworth, the painter David Roberts and the photographers Hill and Adamson.
Burns and Wordsworth, blown away by the Chapel and the beauty of the surrounding landscape, wrote affectionate verses, while Scott not only penned a haunting poem - The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) - but also, in his Knight Templar novel The Talisman (1871), used the interior of the church at Rosslyn as his bewitching Chapel of the Hermit of Engaddi.
More recently in this long line of creative writers was Dan Brown with The Da Vinci Code (2003, and 2006 film), which uses the Chapel as a key location in its quest for the Holy Grail. The book and film's connection with Rosslyn is covered in detail in a later section.