Rosslyn Chapel

Any DaVinci Code fans reading this? If so, you'll hopefully find this as bafflingly interesting as I did.

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon, after I got out of my Linear Algebra final exam, I took a break from studying to go to the small town of Rosslyn about a half hour outside of Edinburgh. My friend and I scoped out the bus schedule and found the public bus that would bring us to Rosslyn Chapel. She had suggested it a while before and the name had sounded vaguely familiar until I remembered the Dan Brown books. For anyone who hasn't read them (other than the fact that you should change that) Rosslyn Chapel is a key site of conspiracy theories about the quest for the Holy Grail in the first book.

After about 25 minutes, Edinburgh faded away and was replaced by farms and sheep and rolling hills. Gotta love Scotland. The bus let us off a short walk from the chapel, and after a quick peek at the visitor's center we entered the walls surrounding the chapel.

Alas, no pictures were allowed inside.

The chapel is much smaller that I expected. However size was not an issue because the chapel is not known for grandeur, but for its intricate carvings. There is hardly any symmetry inside which makes every wall panel, column, and window unique. There is a lot of speculation about the meaning of the carvings in the chapel. There are many "hidden" carvings of Christ strewn throughout the chapel, most famously amongst stars and flowers carved into the ceiling.

Another example of the intrigue of the carvings is: around the edge of one of the windows are ears of corn. One of the chapel's informative plaques said that corn does (or did) not grow anywhere in the UK, and this chapel was built long before English settlers had gotten to America...so how did the masons know what corn was? Did someone in Scotland discover America before Christopher Columbus? These are the conspiracies that arise in the chapel. Amazing!

This afternoon was the perfect outing to take a break from studying before putting my nose back into the books.