William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, broke ground on 20 September 1456 for a collegiate church, and what went up is one of the most densely carved buildings in Britain: over 110 Green Men, faces with foliage growing out of them, and 213 ornamental cubes whose pattern nobody has explained, though the suggestion they encode music keeps coming back. Since the late 1980s, and hard after The Da Vinci Code in 2003, it has been tied to the Knights Templar and to Freemasonry. Medieval historians do not accept it, and the detail that sinks it is a good one: the chapel went up about 150 years after the Templars were dissolved, and the Sinclairs had testified AGAINST the order at its Edinburgh trial in 1309. Robert L. D. Cooper has written the debunking at length. Go for the carving, which needs no legend. Roslin, Midlothian.
Midlothian, Scotland
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