Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T03:38:28.349Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? A Letter from Edinburgh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 1998

KENNETH M. BOYD
Affiliation:
Edinburgh University Medical School, Institute of Medical Ethics, and Church of St. John the Evangelist, Princes Street, Edinburgh, Scotland

Abstract

Like many other locals, I was unprepared for the global media's invasion of Roslin. The former mining village just outside the southern city limits is best known to most Edinburgh citizens for its tiny, ornately carved medieval chapel. Constructed for Crusading Knights and long associated with Freemasons, Rosslyn Chapel was made famous by Sir Walter Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. Nowadays it is visited, in coachloads, by devotees of less literary and historically more dubious esoterica, many of whom believe that the Holy Grail and/or a ‘true’ version of the gospels are buried beneath it. In the local media, demands for the chapel's foundations to be excavated in search of secret clues to the meaning of life, death, and everything, have figured just as prominently as articles agonizing over scientific developments at the Roslin Institute, half a country mile away.

Type
SPECIAL SECTION: CLONING: TECHNOLOGY, POLICY, AND ETHICS
Copyright
© 1998 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)