Hotels near Rosslyn Chapel

Sir William St Clair founded this collegiate church in 1446 and died in 1484 without finishing it, which is why the building you walk into is only the choir of a far larger design. What did get built is carved to an obsessive degree. More than 110 Green Men, human faces sprouting leaves from their mouths, watch you from the vaulting and the capitals. That is genuine pre-Christian harvest imagery, not gift-shop spookiness, which makes Rosslyn Chapel the most thematically honest stop on this list and the one almost nobody books for Halloween.

Roslin sits about 11 km south of the city, and that distance is the whole point. While Edinburgh's Old Town compresses into one long ticket queue in the last week of October, the chapel runs its ordinary timetable: Monday to Saturday 09:00 to 17:00, Sunday from 12:00. Admission is £12 for adults, £10 concession, and under-18s in a family group go free. A short talk by chapel staff is included and runs several times a day.

The honest downside is the return leg. Lothian Buses service 37 takes 45 to 60 minutes each way and the chapel closes at 17:00, so a visit here eats most of your daylight on a day when the sun is gone by 16:39. If you want to be on Calton Hill for gates at 18:30, treat Rosslyn as a morning and nothing else. Visitor numbers peaked near 159,000 in 2007-08 on the back of The Da Vinci Code and have settled well below that since.

Pro Tip: Board service 37 at North Bridge rather than Princes Street, and check the destination blind reads Penicuik/Deanburn via Roslin before you step on, because other 37 workings do not pass the chapel. Be on a bus before 10:00 and you are back at Edinburgh Waverley by early afternoon with the light still up.