Chapelle du St Sépulcre
In the east, halfway between Campagnac and Saint Urbain, stands a chapel, in the past the location of an annual pilgrimage, built in the 18th century on a certainly older part.
From this site, one enjoys a beautiful panorama on the Lot valley, the Aubrac, Saint Laurent d'Olt and the Lozère, Ajas and the cliff of Montplô.
A rustic decoration representing a setting in the tomb decorates the lintel of the door.
The exterior coating bears graffiti of sawyers.
The visible interior layout, as well as obvious reuses (stone with large cupules reused in the "trunk") testify to the existence of an older building.
During a cleaning of the surroundings, a key dating from the XV-XVI c. was indeed discovered.
Several legends are attached to this place:
- The site would have been the seat of a hermitage
- Thieves having robbed and killed the driver of an oxcart, overcome with remorse, would have decided to build an expiatory chapel at the place where the oxcart, distraught, would have stopped with the cart, on which the victim's body had remained.
The vocation of the chapel, dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre (which is rare in Rouergue), the ancient presence of an altarpiece representing the three Maries (the Virgin, Mary Salome and Mary Cleophaste) often associated with the triad of matrons (tria matres), as well as the toponym Azuel, located nearby: "the place from which one sees" may suggest the hypothesis that the St. Sepulchre could have materialized the Christianization of an older pagan place that would have been organized around the spring of Saint Urbain, a nearby hamlet.
Some springs were said to have the ability to cure eye diseases. There could be a connection between these miraculous cures and the place where the dead returned to the celestial light.
Indeed, in ancient times, death was considered as the Discovery of the Light, the Revelation. Numerous Occitan poems of the Middle Ages, the "Albes" (the Dawns), sing of this expectation of the watchman who waits all night for the light of day, the watchman who waits for the dawn (Pierre-Marie BLANQUET)