Roslin Chapel. View of chapel from S.

Description Roslin Chapel. View of chapel from S.

Date c. 1890

Collection Papers of Erskine Beveridge, antiquarian, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland

Catalogue Number SC 746333

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of ML 739

Scope and Content Roslin Chapel, Midlothian Roslin (or Rosslyn) Chapel, the church of a college established c.1447 by William Sinclair, 3rd Earl of Orkney, was intended to be cruciform, but in the end only the choir was built. It is famous, however, not for its size but for the remarkable decorative 15th-century stone carving that covers almost every part of the building. Erskine Beveridge photographed the exterior c.1890. The chapel has an aisled choir of five bays, marked out by pinnacled buttresses, and a low, rectangular sacristy at the east end (right). The lower storey has two-light windows with simple tracery, and a south door, protected by a shallow porch slung between the buttresses. The upper windows (clerestory) of the choir, taller and more sparsely decorated than those below, are set between flying buttresses whose function is purely decorative. The rich carving of the exterior, which is more representative of the churches of Portugal or Spain than those of late medieval Scotland, is in a late Gothic style. It mostly consists of foliage, carved with a denseness and repetitiveness that resembles icing on a cake more than carving in stone. The window heads are lined with thick foliage, sometimes in trails, and even the surface of the window tracery is ornamented, again mainly with foliage but occasionally with a dogtooth pattern. Several of the windows have the odd motif of a saltire cross. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

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