Rosslyn Chapel is situated eight miles south of Edinburgh and has captured the imagination of many in recent years, not least in Dan Brown's fiction. This extraordinary building, dating from the fifteenth century, has long been a place of pilgrimage for people with widely varying interests, whether historical, architectural, or spiritual.

For many years, Peter Snow has been gathering the stories as represented by the many carvings in and around the chapel building. Many of the carvings, eroded by the years or damaged by vandalism during the Reformation, have been lovingly restored over...