Interest in the Rosslyn Chapel, featured in the Da Vinci Code, has reached extraordinary proportions, with hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. This book is responding to that interest by offering the most authentic account of the building of the chapel yet published. John Ritchie, a journalist who was born in the village and whose family has been bound up with the chapel for generations, has teamed up with successful author Alan Butler to produce this definitive account. For the first time, they introduce Sir Gilbert Haye, a 15th century genius and precursor of the Renaissance, Keeper of the Royal Library in France, and family tutor to the Earl, William Sinclair, who built the chapel. They tell the truth about the chapel's relationship with the creation of speculative freemasonry, and the link between this and a very important pan European philosophy, a philosophy which promulgated a form of biblical Christianity, which had always rejected the strangling false dogma of the established Catholic Church. They explain the meanings behind the chapel's fantastic carvings, such as those showing corn cobs which would have been carved two centuries before Europeans apparently visited the Americas and found the plant. The pillar which for 200 years has had its story hidden, until now. It is a journey through a secret library of stone, to the very essence of history itself. Importantly, Butler and Ritchie show that the truth about the chapel is stranger than fiction, and allow the chapel itself, to tell it own story through its carvings.