Roslin

The Inn at Roslin's Table

The Original Rosslyn Inn has been in the same family since March 1973, when Grahame Harris took the licence. He and his son Richard run it still, more than fifty years on. It stands about five minutes' walk from Rosslyn Chapel and pours hand-crafted ales alongside a menu that runs from homemade steak and ale pie — made with Stewart Brewing ale — to haggis clapshot, roast beef, smoked salmon and broth. Puddings are sticky toffee, brownies and apple pie. The dogs get their own menu. Upstairs there are rooms, and through the back a conservatory you can hire and a Snug Bar kept as community space.

The building dates to 1837, and Robert Burns, William Wordsworth and Sir Walter Scott are all said to have stopped here. Its Grail Restaurant works with seasonal Scottish produce — sustainably sourced fish, grass-fed beef matured 35 days — and changes a market menu daily. For a village this size it is a lot of kitchen, and it is more or less the whole of the village's food and drink.

Carvings, Legends and Castle Ruins

The reason most people come is a short walk up the road. Rosslyn Chapel, properly the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew, was begun in 1446 by William Sinclair, 1st Earl of Caithness, and its interior is carved to a density that has kept scholars arguing for centuries. Its roof rests on thirteen columns, the most famous being the Apprentice Pillar, wound with swirling vines said to rise from the mouths of eight dragons at its base. Legend has it an apprentice cut the pillar while the master mason was away, and the mason killed him in a rage on his return. The Da Vinci Code made the place a global name; the Templar and Holy Grail stories predate it by a long way.

Below the chapel, on a steep promontory above the River North Esk, stand the ruins of Roslin Castle, parts of which date to 1304. The Earl of Rosslyn's family have held it since the fourteenth century, and one habitable wing is now let as holiday accommodation by the Landmark Trust.

Into Roslin Glen

The walking starts at the glen. Roslin Glen Country Park fills the wooded valley below the village — riverside trails, wildflower meadows, ancient woodland and one of the larger rookeries in Midlothian. The North Esk Way runs through it toward Loanhead one way and Auchendinny the other, and the Gunpowder and Paper path follows the river south to Penicuik, past the ruins of the works that gave it the name. Scotland's largest gunpowder factory ran here from 1804 to 1954, powered by waterwheels on the Esk. Scott knew the woods well: "A morning of leisure can scarcely be anywhere more delightfully spent than in the woods of Rosslyn."

Battles, Burgh and Dolly

A Scots force won the Battle of Roslin here in 1303; James II made the place a burgh in 1456; coal was mined from the twelfth century until the 1960s. In 1996 the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, Dolly the sheep, was created at the Roslin Institute in the village.

Seven Miles from Edinburgh

Edinburgh is seven miles north, about twenty minutes by road. John Lawson Johnston, who invented Bovril, was born in Roslin in 1839, and left the same way most people do — for the city up the road.