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Origin and history

The Notre-Dame de l'Épine chapel, located in Teloché in the Pays de la Loire, consists of a narrow and low fore-nave covered with flat tiles, and a taller and wider nave covered with slates, closed by a polygonal bedside. The building, 10 metres long by 7 metres wide, has a contrasting architecture reflecting its construction periods in the 15th and 17th centuries. Its history remains poorly documented, but local tradition reports that it would have been erected around 1430 after a Marian appearance over a dubepine bush, promising the end of epidemics and wars to the inhabitants.

According to legend, the name Notre-Dame de l'Épine would come from this miraculous bush, around which a pilgrimage was developed. The chapel, which became communal property, was partially protected by an inscription under the Historical Monuments in 2021, covering its cadastral right of way (section YM, plot 6). Its present state and its openness to the public are not specified in the available sources, but its historical role seems to be linked to Marian devotion and local religious practices.

Sources, including Monumentum, highlight the lack of detailed archives of its history, limiting the knowledge of its architectural evolution or its precise use over the centuries. The location, noted as mediocre (level 5/10), and the photographs available under the Creative Commons license (A. Chaumaret) suggest an isolated monument, anchored in the Sarthois rural landscape, but whose posterity largely depends on oral traditions and collective memory.

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