From the outside, the Rosslyn Chapel does not look like a suitable place to hide Jesus' head. It's not much bigger than a country church, standing inconspicuously on a small hill in the miniature Scottish town of Roslin, a few miles south of Edinburgh. Its Gothic pinnacles, flying buttresses, and pointed arches have been battered by 500 years of capricious weather, and for years it has been encased in an exoskeleton of scaffolding as restoration efforts plod along. Until recently, it was covered by a giant black canopy.
But inside the chapel, beneath the carvings that blanket the walls and ceiling, is a spartan stone crypt that figures into one of history's most famous mythologies. According to legend, the treasure of the fabled Knights Templar is stowed in a still-deeper vault whose entrance is sealed off by a stone wall. Depending on whom you ask, that treasure is the Holy Grail, sacred scrolls from the time of Christ, a fragment of the cross on which he died, or even his embalmed head, secreted out of the Holy Land as the Templars fled prosecution.
If any of this sounds familiar, it's because Dan Brown borrowed this legend for The Da Vinci Code. In the book's climactic scene, the heroes race from London to Roslin, tailed by a hodgepodge group of French police and Catholic thugs. (At this point, they're on the brink of exposing a 2,000-year conspiracy to erase evidence that Christ had children.) They discover that the Holy Grail itself did once reside at Rosslyn, left there by the Templars so many centuries back, but has since vanished again.
http://www.slate.com/id/2293858/The next time I'm in Scotland...
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