Abbatiale Sainte-Valérie de Chambon-sur-Voueize

Chambon-sur-Voueize

Limousin legend tells that Valérie, a young aristocrat of Aquitaine converted by Saint Martial, refused to marry the pagan duke to whom she had been promised. Condemned to death, she was beheaded — and, by a prodigy reported by tradition, picked up her own head and carried it to lay at the feet of Saint Martial in the middle of Mass. This figure of a cephalophore saint became one of the most venerated in Aquitaine: in 1171, at his investiture as duke in Limoges, Richard the Lionheart received "the ring of Saint Valérie", like a mystical marriage with the province. It was to shelter her relics, brought to safety from the Norman raids by monks from Saint-Martial of Limoges as early as 857, that a community settled on the banks of the Voueize; a chapel rose around 985, and the town of Chambon grew up around it. From the 11th to the 13th century, the Benedictines, now within the orbit of Cluny, built one of the largest Romanesque churches in the Limousin: an immense nave, granite bell towers, carved stalls. The treasury preserves a 14th-century bust reliquary of Saint Valérie, still carried in procession. Plundered and mistreated in the 15th and 16th centuries and restored in the 19th, the abbey church was listed in the very first list of monuments historiques, in 1840. Beneath its vaults, the little town in the Creuse keeps the memory of one of the great founding legends of the Limousin, between hagiography and the history of the dukes of Aquitaine.

Getting there : Place Massy, in the centre of the village, at the confluence of the Voueize and the Tardes; car park close by. The gorges of the Voueize offer a walk starting from the village.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

Ambient sound