This is the story of a place and a name, the church and castle of Rosslyn and the Sanctus Clarus or St. Clair or Sinclair. It is the story of how this family appeared and died out in two thousand five hundred years of battles, from the Trojan War to the Camlann War, from the Crusades to the clashes of Bannockburn, Culloden and Yorktown.
But above all it is the compelling narrative of the eternal war between religions, which began with the pagan gods Apollo and Mithras, and then continued with Christianity and Islam, and the great heresy that believes in a direct relationship with God, the heresy of the Cathars as well as of the Knights Templar and, closer to us, of the Protestant Reformation.
In the mysterious Gothic church of Rosslyn the Templars joined with the arts and crafts guilds to create a third Temple of Solomon, under the protection of the landowning St. Clairs. Faithful to the Stuarts, the Catholic faith and the Jacobites, when they were defeated they moved to America and France where their Scottish lodges produced decisive figures for both revolutions.
Having lost their riches, the Sinclairs of Rosslyn instead saw their church and castle fall into ruins as the legend of what they had truly believed and done was born .
