La Chapelle Sept Saints

This is profoundly weird. If anyone is in any doubt that Christianity is any more than just an iron age idol-worshipping death cult, then they should come here.

This allee couverte has been completely integrated into the chapel and now forms its crypt. You can get into it through a little iron gate, but obviously you can’t see it’s original exterior shape anymore because it’s been swallowed up by the church.

The stones are massive and would have to be to (partially) take the weight of the chapel built over it.

Now it’s been reduced to a cave-like hidey-hole for seven crudely carved dollies, paint peeling and faded. Seven tacky wooden figures of third century Turkish saints who were drowned each stand about a foot high behind a wooden fence so you can’t reach them. Or were they the seven dwarfs? There’s even a little toy boat, presumably to remind people of the way the saints died. I actually counted eight dollies – perhaps one of them was Snow White, I wondered? No, no, it must have been the virgin Mary.

The resemblance of the figures to the kind of idols you find in animist religions in West Africa and Papua New Guinea was striking and made all the more powerful by their position in this ancient monument. Definitely worth seeing for the weird-factor alone.

In this little village is a strange little church, on the whole it seems like any other church but part of it is built over and incorperating an allee couverte. Other instances of this can be seen in Geurnsey, Spain, and Portugal, so their pretty rare.
Entry to the tomb is closed off by a big red gate but the key can be attaind from the local post office, as it was a sunday it was closed so we made do with looking through the bars and looking in the church.Inside the church you can see a statue of St. Michel slaying a dragon, and the upper surface of a capstone.
Within the tomb are 7 statues said to be found buried inside it when it was first explored centuries ago and now occupying space on a shelf, the statues are also said to be the seven sleepers of Ephesus.
One legend says the allee couverte dates from the beginning of the world.