St Anthony's Chapel and Hermitage

No foundation charter survives and no builder is named in any surviving record, so the beginning of the chapel is simply not known. The earliest secure date is 1426, when the Pope granted money towards repairing it — which places the building not merely standing but already worn by the first quarter of the fifteenth century. Two institutional links have been proposed for it. One is the Preceptory of St Anthony, a local house of a religious order which maintained a skin hospice at Leith in the same period, and which the dedication would suit. The other is Holyrood Abbey, the monastery under an abbot that David I founded directly below the crag in 1128. Neither has been demonstrated, and the sources that raise them raise them as possibilities rather than findings.

Enough of the building was recorded before it came down for its plan to be recovered. The chapel was rectangular, about 43 by 18 feet (13.1 by 5.5 m), with walls roughly three feet (0.9 m) thick, built from stone quarried close to the site. A tower stood at the west end, a little over 39 feet (11.9 m) high, and probably carried a spiral stair within the thickness of its own wall. A second and smaller structure stood alongside the chapel and part of it still does; its use is unknown.

The chapel is drawn on Richard Lee's sketch plan of Edinburgh, made when Lord Hertford's forces raided the city in 1544, so it was intact enough then to be worth marking on a military survey. It had become a ruin well before the end of the following century. Hugo Arnot, writing The History of Edinburgh in 1779, called it "a beautiful Gothick building, well suited to the rugged sublimity of the rock", and put the tower at its west end at about forty feet high — close enough to the measured figure to suggest he was looking at masonry still largely in place. What has been lost since went slowly, and without record. The north wall and a fragment of the west wall are what remain.

A tradition recorded by James Grant has the chapel raised to protect a holy spring on the slope beneath it, St Anthony's Well. By that account the spring failed altogether in 1674 and, after some decades, reappeared at a lower point on the hill. It is reported as tradition rather than as evidence, and it is not the only reason offered for the chapel being where it is. The ground directly below the ruin has in any case changed shape since: the sheet of water now called St Margaret's Loch was boggy marshland until 1856, when it was dug out as part of Prince Albert's improvements to the land around the Palace of Holyroodhouse, some 500 m to the west.

The chapel carries no legal designation of its own. In 2013 the whole of Holyrood Park, excepting the occupied buildings and the lodges, was made a scheduled monument — a site protected by law for its archaeological importance — and the ruin is covered by that single designation, alongside the traces of four prehistoric hillforts — Dunsapie Hill, Samson's Ribs, Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat itself — together with the cultivation terraces running down the eastern slopes. Historic Environment Scotland manages the park and holds the designation record. Archaeological survey has taken place at various points across the park, but its findings are described as not yet fully understood.