Rosslyn Chapel

The chapel describes itself as "just seven miles south of Edinburgh's city centre". The bus that gets you there is Lothian service 37, which the chapel tells visitors to identify by the destination on the front — Penicuik or Deanburn via Roslin.

It leaves from stops on Princes Street, on the shop side, or from North Bridge, and the chapel puts the journey at "around 45 to 60 minutes". You get off in Roslin village at the stop by the Original Rosslyn Inn and walk about 240 metres up Chapel Loan.

Why there is no rail fare on this page

The chapel publishes the Borders Railway times itself — 18 minutes from Edinburgh Waverley to Eskbank, and 37 minutes from Tweedbank — and then a bus of about 30 minutes from the Muirpark stop on Bonnyrigg Road, or a short taxi. Those journey times are the operator's customer's own figures and we print them as published.

What we will not print is a rail fare. ScotRail's website answered every attempt we made on 30 August 2026 — plain fetch, headless browser and a real browser session — with a bot-verification wall, so no fare on this site is a checked one. The company's app and the station ticket office are the only reliable places to read it. The bus, at £2.40, needs no such caveat, which is another argument for the 37.

Driving and parking

From the city centre the chapel's own directions are to follow signs for Newington or Liberton, then the A701 towards Penicuik; from the bypass, leave at the Straiton junction and follow the A701. Look for the brown tourist signs as you come into Roslin. Parking at the chapel is free, at the owner's risk, with an electric-vehicle charging point in the main car park and five accessible bays about 55 metres from the visitor centre entrance.

There is a gradual slope up from the car park with benches before the door, and a passenger can be dropped off outside while the driver parks.

On foot and by bike

The chapel sits on the route of the British Pilgrimage Trust's Edinburgh Cathedral pilgrimage, so it is a walkable destination for anyone treating the day as a long walk. Cyclists get bike racks in the main car park, National Cycle Routes 1 and 196 pass within five miles, and a largely traffic-free path runs south from Loanhead to Roslin village, ending close to the chapel. The chapel also flags a five-mile route from Edinburgh linking Duddingston, Niddrie, Moredun and Gilmerton with Roslin — a genuine alternative to the bus on a dry day.

The talk is the part people miss. A chapel guide speaks about half an hour into every slot, for 10 to 15 minutes, on the history, the St Clair family and the key carvings.

It is included in the admission price, it is optional, and you are free to keep looking around during it. Aim to be inside a few minutes before the talk time on the row you booked.

The ticket terms worth reading before you pay

Tickets are non-refundable. A date or time change can be made up to 24 hours ahead through the Manage My Booking link in the confirmation email, subject to availability. Nothing is posted to you: bring the confirmation on paper or on a screen, and bring proof of any concession or pass.

The 90 minutes is time in the chapel — the grounds, the visitor centre, the shop and the coffee shop are extra, and staff may let you start early if the site is quiet.

• Tickets non-refundable; date changes up to 24 hours before, availability permitting
• Payment by debit or credit card, but not American Express or Maestro; there is a cash machine in the village
• Arriving late in your slot eats into your own 90 minutes, not anyone else's
• Under-17s are free in a family group but may only enter with an adult aged 18 or over
• An annual pass is sold online, activated with a photo, and booked through the Chapel Passholder Entry option

What is included besides the chapel

Admission covers the chapel, the grounds, the visitor centre and its interpretation, the free carvings map — printed in 13 languages, from Dutch and Hungarian to Japanese and Mandarin — and the talk. The visitor centre opened in 2012, is all on one level, and holds the coffee shop and the gift shop; the coffee shop lists vegan and gluten-free items with stickers on the counter, and looks out over Roslin Glen. Handheld BSL and audio-described tours are available on request at the front desk, which the chapel added as a new service in its March 2026 access update.

The chapel was founded by William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, with the founding charter granted from Rome in 1446 and the ground broken on 20 September 1456 — the two dates are why you will see both quoted, including on the chapel's own welcome copy. It was built as a collegiate church, with canons and choristers endowed to sing the offices; it was never finished to the founder's design, and his son roofed the choir with the stone vault you stand under. After the Reformation it fell into disrepair, Cromwell's troops are said to have stabled horses in it in 1650, and it was rededicated in 1862 after Victorian restoration.

The Apprentice Pillar, and the story attached to it

Three pillars divide the east end: the Master Pillar, the Journeyman Pillar and the Apprentice Pillar. The last one was originally called the Prince's Pillar in a 1778 account, and the name we use comes from an 18th-century legend — the master mason travelling abroad to study the original design, returning to find his apprentice had carved it unaided, and killing him with a mallet blow to the head. A carved face in the opposite corner is pointed out as the master, condemned to look at the work forever.

It is a story, not a record, and the chapel's guides tell it as one. A full-size plaster cast of the pillar and its bay was made in 1871 and stands in the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Green Men, plant carvings and the 213 cubes

There are more than 110 Green Men in and around the building — faces with foliage growing from their mouths — and finding them is the single best thing to do with a child on this visit; the chapel's own things-to-do pages suggest exactly that, and the free carvings map exists for it. Then there are the plants: wheat, strawberries, lilies, and the carvings some authors have claimed depict New World maize, which would predate Columbus. The botanist Adrian Dyer, who examined them, found only one identifiable plant among the botanical carvings and concluded the "maize" and "aloe" were stylised patterns that only coincidentally resemble real species. The scholarly consensus is coincidence.

Above you, 213 carved cubes protrude from pillars and arches, patterned and unexplained. People have tried to read music and code into them for decades; nothing has stuck, and many of the cubes are 19th-century replacements for eroded originals, which undercuts any decoding exercise before it starts.

Down the stairs, and outside

The sacristy below the chapel is reached by a stair and is worth the descent for the change of scale alone. Outside, the exterior carving is as dense as the interior and — unlike inside — you may photograph it freely for personal use. Walk the grounds to Roslin Glen, and if you have the afternoon, the path down to Rosslyn Castle from the chapel is short, steep in places and the reason many visitors say the setting made the trip.

The Da Vinci Code was published in 2003 and filmed in 2006, and the chapel's visitor numbers followed: close to 159,000 in 2007–08, at the height of it. The speculation the novel drew on is older — a wave of books from the 1980s tying Rosslyn to the Knights Templar, Freemasonry, the Holy Grail and a bloodline of Jesus, itself descended from the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the Priory of Sion hoax.

Medieval historians say these accounts have no basis in fact, and the specific objections are easy to follow. The chapel was built roughly 150 years after the dissolution of the Templars. The St Clair family testified against the Templars at their trial in Edinburgh in 1309. The three-pillar arrangement said to encode Masonic degrees cannot: the third degree of Scottish Freemasonry was invented around 1720, nearly three centuries after the chapel was founded. Robert Cooper, curator of the Grand Lodge of Scotland's museum, wrote a whole book taking the claims apart line by line, and the historian Louise Yeoman publicly criticised the trust in 2006 for keeping the Templar story on its interpretation boards.

What is actually under the floor

The crypt has been sealed for many years, which is exactly the condition in which legends breed: variously the Holy Grail, the Templar treasure, the mummified head of Christ or the original Scottish crown jewels have been placed down there by one author or another. What is documented is that the chapel has been the burial place of generations of Sinclairs, and that three human skeletons were found during the conservation work. Nobody has opened the vault, and the chapel makes no claim about it.

So is it worth visiting if you have not read the book?

Yes, and arguably more so. What survives contact with the sceptics is the stone: a small 15th-century building carved to a density that has no real parallel in Britain, plus a suffragette bombing in 1914, a 14-year steel canopy erected over the roof to dry the building out, and a conservation programme that ran from 1997 to 2013. The chapel is still a working place of worship in the Scottish Episcopal Church, with services at 10:00 on Sunday mornings — which is also why it does not open to visitors until noon that day.

The photography ban is total and it is the one that stings. No photographs and no video inside the chapel, for health and safety and to protect the visit for other people; that includes Google Glass, Meta smart glasses and any other wearable recording device, which must be switched off and removed or stored before you go in. Drones need written permission.

Exterior photography for personal use is unrestricted, so the carved outside walls are where your camera earns its keep.

• No photography or video inside, camera glasses included; exterior photos are fine
• Historic Scotland, National Trust for Scotland and equivalent membership cards get no free or discounted entry here — the chapel says so in writing
• External guides may not lead groups inside the chapel; they can present in the grounds only, so a walking-tour guide will hand you over at the door
• Assistance dogs only, in the visitor centre, chapel and grounds alike
• No wedding photography unless the ceremony itself is taking place at the chapel

The Sunday problem, and how to avoid it

Sunday opening starts at noon. Services run at 10:00 in the morning, and the chapel is a working church first. If you catch an early 37 on a Sunday you will stand in Roslin for two hours with a coffee. Three slots run that day instead of five, so a Sunday visit is also the one most likely to be full. If your only free day is a Sunday, book the 12:00 slot the moment you know your dates.

The reverse trap is the last slot of the day, listed in the slot table. It is the quietest one and a good choice in summer, but leave enough of a margin for the bus back into the city.

Access, in the chapel's own words

The access information was updated in March 2026. The visitor centre is a modern single-level building with an automatic sliding door 87 cm wide and a lowered section at the entry desk. Five accessible bays sit about 55 metres from the entrance, and there is a gradual upward slope with benches before you reach it; taxis usually drop visitors right outside.

Disabled visitors pay the reduced £10.00 rate and a carer or assistant visits free. The chapel is candid that a 15th-century building cannot be made fully accessible, and it has commissioned a detailed AccessAble guide, an autism visual story and BSL and audio-described handheld tours for the front desk.

Put it on a morning, book the 10:30 or the 12:15 slot, and be back in the city by mid-afternoon with the rest of the day intact. That is the whole argument for going independently: no other trip on the day trips hub returns you in time to do something else. A 09:00 slot means catching the 37 at about eight, which is a hard start for a holiday; the last slot at 15:30 is the quietest and pairs with a slow lunch beforehand.

Avoid Sunday morning entirely, and if a Sunday is your only option, book the noon slot early — three slots instead of five is a third less capacity on the day most visitors are free.

If you are choosing between this and a full-day tour

Take the chapel on its own when the rest of your trip is city-based and tight for time, and take a coach day when you have a whole spare day and want ground you cannot otherwise cover. The Borders tour is the one to pick for landscape and Melrose; the Stirling day is the one to pick if you have not already booked Stirling Castle separately, because its admission is included; the Hadrian's Wall day is the longest at ten and a half hours and the only one that crosses into England.

One practical note for families: under-17s are free at the chapel in a family group, which makes the independent option dramatically cheaper for four people than any coach — two adults on the 37 with two children is £24 of admission and about £9.60 of bus fares, against roughly £250 for the same four seats on the Borders tour.