Abstract

Like many other locals, I was unprepared for the global media's invasion of Roslin. The former mining village just outside the southern city limits is best known to most Edinburgh citizens for its tiny, ornately carved medieval chapel. Constructed for Crusading Knights and long associated with Freemasons, Rosslyn Chapel was made famous by Sir Walter Scott's LayoftheLastMinstrel. Nowadays it is visited, in coachloads, by devotees of less literary and historically more dubious esoterica, many of whom believe that the Holy Grail and/or a version of the gospels are buried beneath it. In the local media, demands for the chapel's foundations to be excavated in search of secret clues to the meaning of life, death, and everything, have figured just as prominently as articles agonizing over scientific developments at the Roslin Institute, half a country mile away