100 Places You Will Never Visit (15 page)

What makes Rosslyn so distinctive is its amazing stonemasonry—a mixture of theological subjects and flights of fancy. Perhaps the single most notable feature is the “Prentice Pillar,” supposedly carved by a humble apprentice who was slaughtered by his master in a fit of professional jealousy when he saw how grand it was. The Chapel also contains some 120 carvings of bearded green men, as well as 213 cubes carved around the ceiling and engraved with mysterious symbols. Some modern musicologists believe it to be an obscure musical notation system. What is clear is that the architects and stonemasons were given free rein to express their creativity.

The most enduring rumor concerning the chapel is that Sir William St. Clair was a prominent Freemason and a Knight Templar to boot, and that the church is home to treasures and important documents from one or both organizations. The Knights Templar was an elite religious military order famed for its escapades during the Crusades. It acquired immense wealth over the years and won a reputation among some as the guardian of the Holy Grail. But the fact is, Rosslyn was not built until the middle of the 15th century, a good 130 years after the Knights Templar had been dissolved at the command of the papacy, and 200 years before the first recorded evidence of the Freemasons.

However, the myth that has perhaps attracted more attention to Rosslyn than any other in recent times is that the Chapel is the resting place of the Holy Grail itself, a theory propounded in The Da Vinci Code. Most historians, though, believe there is little evidence to back up such an assertion (and especially some of the wilder claims as to what actually constitutes the mysterious “Grail” itself). Given that most experts now disregard the Chapel’s Knights Templar links, it is perhaps wisest to regard the whole story as fictional.

ANOTHER DIMENSION This computer rendering shows Rosslyn Chapel’s structure in 3-D. Researchers have used detailed laser scanning in a bid to establish if there are hidden treasures lying beneath the church floor. So far they have found scant evidence of Holy Grails or entombed Knights Templar but the quest continues.

Nonetheless, the most avid conspiracy theorists hold that the evidence for even their most outrageous claims lies buried by the St. Clair family in secret vaults not examined for centuries (and, of course, a “secret vault” at Rosslyn has a vital role in the Da Vinci Code denouement). Indeed, there are chambers deep beneath the church that have long been unopened and non-invasive seismic surveys carried out in the 1980s suggested the presence of metal objects within them. A proposed underground excavation of recent times was halted when the excavation team encountered an impassable wall.

The fact that the Chapel’s owners have refused requests to open the vaults for fear of undermining the Chapel’s medieval foundations is merely grist to the mill for those convinced that they have something to hide. The vaults’ most likely contents are the bodies of several generations of the St. Clair family, many of whom were reputed to be buried in full armor until the practice stopped in the early 18th century. A little macabre, perhaps, but not indicative of any historical conspiracy. However, until such a time as the St. Clair-controlled Rosslyn Chapel Trust decides to open the vaults up to public inspection, the market in Rosslyn conspiracies is likely to remain bullish.

1 UNFINISHED BEAUTY Amazingly, the spectacular Chapel forms only a small part of William St. Clair’s ambitious original plan for a much larger, cruciform church.

2 GREEN MAN More than 100 bizarre faces are scattered around the Chapel, surrounded by intricately carved greenery that often emerges from their mouths. These “Green Men” are thought to be ancient pagan fertility symbols, and may be placed to represent the progression of a year from the east to the west end.

50 Wildenstein Art Collection

LOCATION Stored around the world. Headquartered in Paris.

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Paris, France

SECRECY OVERVIEW Location uncertain: said to be the most valuable private art collection in the world.

Many art collectors are more than willing to show off their prized pieces, but that is not something that could be said of the Wildenstein family. These French multi-millionaires jealously guard the precise details of a collection that has been built up over more than a century, despite their position as perhaps the most famous family in the art world.

The Wildenstein art dynasty began with Nathan Wildenstein in the 1870s. A French cloth merchant by trade, he educated himself in 18th-century painting, and took advantage of a sleeping market to earn a fortune. From his base in Paris, he had extended his empire of galleries to New York, London and Buenos Aires by the end of the 1920s. After Nathan’s death, his son Georges moved the family’s center of operations to the USA in 1940.

The family has been long established as one of the leading suppliers to major galleries and museums throughout the world, but details of the Wildenstein’s total holdings (and their locations) are scant. It has been speculated that the collection is split between secure locations in New York, Paris, London, Buenos Aires and Tokyo, and may include some 10,000 works.

Divorce proceedings in 1999 between Alec Wildenstein (grandson of Georges) and his wife Jocelyn (infamous for her attempts to give herself a feline appearance through plastic surgery) estimated the collection’s value at US$10 billion. It is thought to include works by Giotto di Bondone, Vermeer, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Monet and Van Gogh.

Further sketchy details about the collection have emerged in recent years during further legal battles between family members, and in 2011 a police raid at the Wildenstein Institute in Paris reportedly uncovered many works previously listed as stolen or missing. The Wildensteins came under renewed scrutiny as a result, but it is unlikely the public will get to view their remarkable collection at any point in the near future.

51 La Basse Cour

LOCATION West Flanders, Belgium

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Ghent

SECRECY OVERVIEW Access restricted: home to the First World War’s largest unexploded mine.

La Basse Cour (which translates as “The Farmyard”) is a 60-hectare (150-acre) privately owned farm close to the town of Ypres. Amid the push-and-pull of the First World War’s Western Front, its location on the Messines Ridge put it on the front line of hostilities. Today the farm sits on a massive 22,500-kilogram (50,000-lb) mine that has yet to detonate.

The Messines Ridge fell under German control in the early months of the First World War, and remained so until 1917. It was a major target for British forces stationed in the area and, as it became increasingly clear that trench warfare was producing only stalemate, a radical new plan was put into action.

From January 1916, British troops began digging underground tunnels from their lines around the Ypres Salient toward the German encampments at Messines. The idea was to lay a series of mines that could be exploded shortly before a major troop offensive. In fact, the scheme was put on hold until 1917, when 25 mines and 450,000 kilograms (1 million lb) of explosives were laid underground along an 11-kilometer (7-mile) front after a heroic period of subterranean burrowing.

British forces under the command of General Sir Herbert Plumer began a heavy bombardment of German positions toward the end of May 1917. On June 7, Plumer gave the order to detonate the mines, creating a blast that claimed between 6,000 and 10,000 enemy lives and which was reputedly loud enough to be heard in London. Within a week, the British had secured the Messines Ridge.

However, six of the British mines survived the operation intact. Five of them were left undetonated for strategic reasons, while the sixth was lost during a German counter-mining attack and never recovered. It lay beneath a farm then known as Le Petite Douve, which was renamed as La Basse Cour by its owners, the Mahieu family, in the aftermath of the conflict.

And there the mine survives to the present day. While another of the Messines mines exploded spontaneously in 1955 during a lightning storm, the bomb beneath La Basse Cour remains buried some 24 meters (80 ft) beneath the Mahieus’ property. Its exact location was pinpointed in the 1990s by British researchers using historical maps of the area, but only the foolhardy are likely to want to prod and poke at this sleeping but potentially deadly brute.

1 UNDERGROUND WORLD Specialist tunneling companies dug subterranean trenches across much of the Western Front, such as those preserved in the Wellington Quarry beneath Arras in northeastern France. The mine tunnels were among the most ambitious of all.

2 BIG BANG A rare photograph captures the explosion of the mine under Hawthorn Ridge Redoubt, packed with 18 tons of explosives, at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme in June 1916.

3 LASTING IMPACT The 24-ton Lochnagar Mine, detonated at the beginning of the Battle of the Somme, left behind a crater some 91 meters (300 ft) across and 21 meters (70 ft) deep, which has been preserved in commemoration of the battle.

52 Bilderberg Group Headquarters

LOCATION Unknown, believed to be in Leiden, the Netherlands

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Leiden

SECRECY OVERVIEW Operations classified: hosts to an annual private meeting of global figures.

The Bilderberg Group takes its name from the Bilderberg Hotel near Arnhem in the Netherlands, where its first meeting occurred in 1954. Held strictly behind closed doors, its annual meetings offer an opportunity for a cast of mostly European and American power-brokers to debate world issues. For skeptics, however, the group is a secretive cabal plotting a New World Order.

The Bilderberg Group was established by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, the international banking guru David Rockefeller, Polish diplomat Joseph Retinger and British politician Dennis Healey. Its underlying aim was to bring together the transatlantic great and good to reinforce the liberal, free-market philosophy of the free world. Interviewed years later, Healey freely admitted: “To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”

Over the years, the Group has garnered a remarkable record of inviting guests at the beginning of their careers who go on to become world leaders. This has led some to believe that Bilderberg has had a hand in molding their professional lives to its own ends. However, it is the Bilderberg emphasis on privacy that most infuriates its critics. Even when the group is being ostensibly open, it is at best opaque, they argue. The list of meeting attendees it releases is routinely incomplete, for instance, and while the Group has a website, it includes no details of its head office (widely believed to be located in Leiden).

Most devastatingly, the meetings themselves are aggressively protected by a mixture of private and official security forces. Protesters and journalists who discover the location of meetings—held in high-end hotels at a new location each year—regularly complain of intimidation from hired heavies, and a few claim to have been the victims of more sinister and heavy-handed treatment.

Bilderberg’s defenders say that tight security is essential when you bring together so many important people. Its accusers argue that it’s symptomatic of an over-powerful cabal plotting the world’s future away from the scrutiny of the masses. Alas, you are unlikely ever to find your way to the Group’s head office to get its own take on the question.

53 The Large Hadron Collider

LOCATION Beneath the Franco-Swiss border

NEAREST POPULATION HUB Geneva, Switzerland

SECRECY OVERVIEW Access restricted: the world’s largest particle accelerator, studying the creation of the Universe.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a huge scientific instrument that smashes together subatomic particles called protons at speeds close to the speed of light, in order to replicate conditions that occurred in the trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. However, skeptics are concerned that in searching to understand the origins of the Universe, the experiment could bring about its end.

The LHC is run by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. which authorized funding for the project in 1994. It began operating in 2008, having cost in the region of US$10 billion to build, and consists of a 27-kilometer (17-mile) ring buried 100 meters (330 ft) below ground on the Franco-Swiss border, in an area between the Jura and Alps mountain ranges. The facility makes use of a tunnel previously used for CERN’s Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP), an experiment that was dismantled in 2000.

The big idea behind the LHC is to expand our scientific knowledge beyond that laid out in the Standard Model—a framework that for several decades has provided the most widely accepted explanation for how subatomic particles function. For all its strengths, it has long been realized that the Standard Model leaves many fundamental questions unanswered. The LHC looks to fill some of these gaps by crashing together two beams of “hadrons”—consisting of protons or lead ions—by firing them in opposite directions around the accelerator, the hadrons gaining in energy as they increase in speed with every lap. The powerful magnetic field required to propel these energy-rich particles is provided by 1,750 superconducting magnets kept just a couple of degrees above absolute zero by several hundred thousand liters of liquid helium provided by a series of above-ground refrigeration plants.

WEIRD SCIENCE A view of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS), a giant detector instrument designed to observe an array of particles and phenomena resulting from the LHC’s high-energy collisions. Scientists hope it will provide crucial data to help explain the fundamental structure of the Universe.

After some initial hiccups, the LHC started its experiments in earnest in 2010. At full power, it sends trillions of protons around the accelerator ring at a speed equivalent to 99.9999991 percent of the speed of light, achieving 600 million collisions every second. The effects of these crashes are captured and recorded by one of four vast detectors located at intervals around the accelerator. Each detector weighs several tons and building and fitting them into the LHC was a remarkable feat of engineering. For instance, just one of the detectors—the Atlas detector, which at 7,000 tons is by no means the largest—took a full two years to locate in a specially excavated cavern as deep as a 12-story building.