Chapelle Notre-Dame des Orties

Pluvigner

According to the oral tradition of Pluvigner, a young mute shepherdess was tending her flock at the place called Les Orties (the Nettles) when the Virgin appeared to her and asked her for a lamb. The girl, having miraculously recovered her speech, obtained her father's permission to come back and offer the promised animal; Mary then asked that a chapel be built on the spot, where a statue of the Virgin was discovered among the nettles — stubbornly disappearing and reappearing in the same place until the wish was fulfilled. This legend explains the name of the sanctuary, whose origin actually goes back to an 11th-century Romanesque chapel, enlarged and remodelled in the 15th century: a wall plate bearing the date 1426 has been found there. Attached to the parish church of Saint-Guigner so closely as to form "twin churches" separated by an ossuary, the chapel was invoked against rheumatism. Threatened with collapse, it was largely demolished in the early 1960s; only the crossing, with its double-order pointed arches and carved corbels, still stands facing the church. The memory of the place remains vivid: in 1801, Pope Pius VII granted it an annual jubilee, to be gained every first Sunday of July, perpetuating the memory of this Marian pilgrimage, among the oldest in the Pluvigner country.

Getting there : Remnant freely accessible, visible from the public space opposite the church of Saint-Guigner.

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

Ambient sound