Chapelle Notre-Dame de Lambader, church located in Finistère, in France
Chapelle Notre-Dame de Lambader is a Gothic chapel in Plouvorn with a bell tower nearly 58 metres high, its slender spire rising from a square tower with pinnacles. The interior has three vessels of eight bays separated by octagonal pillars, a pointed barrel-vaulted timber roof, and a carved oak rood screen from the late 15th or early 16th century spanning the nave.
The chapel was built between 1432 and 1440, on a site that had been a Templar commandery and later a priory of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. Classified as a historic monument in 1840, it was restored in 1875-1877 and its bell tower rebuilt from 1881 by the Quimper contractor Jean-Louis Le Naour.
The chapel has long served as a center of devotion to the Virgin Mary, with an annual pilgrimage on the Monday after Pentecost drawing worshippers from surrounding villages. Inside, wooden and stone statues of saints and biblical scenes reflect centuries of local faith and religious practice in this rural setting.
The chapel stands in a wooded hollow at Lambader, southeast of Plouvorn on the Plougourvest boundary, reached by minor roads. It has no enclosing wall: it occupies the southern part of a sloping, tree-planted placître with a calvary to the east. Below the southeast corner is the devotional fountain with its Pietà. The ground slopes toward the building.
The oak rood screen stands at the junction of the fifth and sixth bays, not at the far end of the nave. Its gallery panels, framed by accolade arches, carry vases and scrollwork in early Italianate taste, and it is compared to the screen at Kerfons in Ploubezre. It dates from the last quarter of the 15th or the early 16th century and has lost all its polychromy.
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