The most carved building in Scotland, then the abbey country south of the city, in one private day with an Edinburgh-based driver-guide.
Rosslyn Chapel sits twenty minutes south of Edinburgh, and nothing prepares you for the inside. Every surface of the fifteenth-century interior is carved: green men in the vaulting, a pillar nobody has fully explained, plants that look like maize a generation before anyone in Scotland had seen any. The Da Vinci Code brought the crowds; the stone was doing the work four hundred years earlier.
South of it the Borders open up, and with them the four great abbeys Henry VIII's armies left in ruins. This day takes Melrose, the best preserved of them, then the stretch of the Tweed that Walter Scott made famous, including the view he loved and the house he built with the money his novels made.
Because the day is private, your driver-guide shapes it around you. Longer inside the chapel if the carving holds you, longer on the river if it does not.
Founded in 1446 by William Sinclair and never finished to the plan, which is part of why it looks the way it does. The carving inside is the densest in Scotland: the Apprentice Pillar, the green men, the cubes in the Lady Chapel that musicians still argue about. Allow an hour; most people want more.
The best preserved of the four Border abbeys, and the one with the strangest detail: a pig playing the bagpipes, carved high on the south side. Robert the Bruce asked for his heart to be buried here, and in 1996 a casket was found under the chapter house floor.
A lay-by with the best view in the Borders: the Tweed looping below and the three peaks of the Eildon Hills behind. Walter Scott stopped here so often that the story goes his horses halted on their own when they passed it, on the day of his funeral included.
The house Scott built for himself out of novel royalties, and then nearly lost when his publisher collapsed. It is part Scottish baronial and part museum of his own collecting: armour, a Jacobite relic in every corner, and a library of twenty thousand books he actually read.
The loop as driven, numbered by stop. Coastline from Natural Earth, roads from OpenStreetMap. Hover a stop to find it on the map.
Distance and time come from OpenStreetMap routing and leave out the stops themselves.
This is a year-round day. Rosslyn Chapel opens every day except Christmas and the Borders roads stay clear in all but the worst winter weather, so it is one of the days we still run in January.
Melrose Abbey and Abbotsford keep shorter winter hours. From November to March we check them for your date and tell you before you book.
£650 for the whole party, one to eight travellers. The price does not change with the size of your group: the same £650 whether you are two or eight. Entry tickets are not included, roughly £12 at Rosslyn Chapel, £9 at Melrose Abbey and £14 at Abbotsford per adult. All prices in GBP.
No. Photography inside the chapel is not allowed, and it has been that way for years. Outside is fine, and there is a short film in the visitor centre that covers what you cannot take away with you.
No. The chapel stands on its carving, not on the novel, and Abbotsford is interesting as a house whoever built it. Your driver-guide gives you as much or as little of the literary thread as you want.
The loop is 96 miles, about 2 hours 40 at the wheel measured on the road without stops. It is the shortest of our full-day tours, which leaves time for a proper hour inside the chapel and a slow lunch in Melrose.
We go anyway. Three of the four stops are indoors or sheltered, so this is one of the days rain changes least. We do not cancel for weather. Free cancellation on your side applies up to 7 days before the date, under section 12.4 of our Booking Terms and Conditions.
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