User:WhaleyTim/Sandbox : Roslin

Roslin (sometimes Rosslyn or Roslyn ) is a village in Scotland about forty minutes by bus from the centre of Edinburgh. It is not a bad wee place, with one hotel & bar (or sometimes two when someone tries to make a go of the Royal), a handful of shops, views of the Pentland Hills and nice walks in the nearby glen. Its within an easy drive of Mario’s in Loanhead which do absolutely ace fish and chips and pizza. OK then, so what is it doing on RationalWiki?

Rational

Well, its most recent claim to fame was Dolly the Sheep, who in 1996 was the first animal to be cloned from an adult somatic cell at the Roslin Institute that was then on the outskirts of the village. Notable, but not really RationalWiki material eh?

An older claim to fame is its chapel. On the 20 September 1456, William Sinclair (or St Clair) set his masons to work to build him a private chapel just up the hill from his castle. It would seem that he told them “Don’t’ hold back on this one guys - I want the lot - gargoyles, mythical figures, plants, animals, bible stories, strange nobbly bits, anything you can think of – minimalism if definitely out” . They took him at his word, and the results still continue to amaze despite the money running out well before they could finish the project and a well-meaning but disastrous attempt at preservation by spraying everything with cement in the 1950’s.

Woo

Within the richness and variety of decorations you need look no further for evidence for your own particular piece of historical woo. You want carvings of spacemen, Altlantean submarines, circuit diagrams, plants unknown to Scots at the time etc etc etc? You got’em.

SuperWoo

The most prominent woo is the Knight Templar/Holy Grail/Masonic nonsense. It roughly goes along the lines of:

William Sinclair was a Knight Templar (he wasn’t).

The chapel was modelled on Solomons Temple as was built to contain the greatest treasures of the Templars, including the Holy Grail (it wasn’t).

William Sinclair founded the Masonic Movement in Scotland to protect these treasures (he didn’t, although a descendent, another William Sinclair was first Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Scotland many centuries later).

Other theories include that the Sinclair (St Clair) family are descendents of Jesus. Of course.

As you can imagine the reaction of professional historians is basically “why do people believe all this crap?”,

Internationally Famous Woo

Anyway, for years the chapel welcomed a steady but unspectacular stream of visitors, including William Wordsworth who, while trapped in the Chapel by a vicious rain storm (or as it is called in Scotland, summer) wrote a sonnet that makes one wonder how he ever became poet laureate. In the meantime the chapel slowly decayed.

This all changed after Dan Brown featured a, hmm, imaginative description of the chapel in the best-selling book The Da Vinci Code, and its appearance in the subsequent film. Visitor numbers shot up, and enough money was passing through the tills at the ticket office and gift shop to continue funding the much-needed repairs, as well as leaving enough left over to build a new visitor’s centre, café and coachpark. Alas, it also meant that they could afford to repair the gap in the railings around the back where generations of Roslin folk had sneaked in without having to trouble the ticket-sellers.

Local traders and hoteliers were also somewhat pissed off that coaches were now able to drop and pick-up tourists at the chapel gates, which meant most of visitors did not spend any time (or money) in the village itself. This however did not stop the owner of the farm next to the chapel make a tidy little profit by bottling the contents of his slurry tank and selling it as “Genuine Roslin Da Vinci Code Bullshit”.

Really

If you are ever in Edinburgh, you should go and visit. It is quite wonderful. Just remember to pop into the village and buy a cup of tea or have a pint of 80/- ale.