Notre-Dame-de-Romigier - Manosque (Provence), France CRW_6436rt
(Our Lady of the Bramble)
After the razing of the town by Moors around 900 A.D., the site was largely abandoned for several decades. In 973, a farmer was ploughing to clear a field where the church had once stood, when his cattle stopped, knelt by a bramble bush (roumi, in Provençal), and would no longer advance. The farmer thus dug up the bush himself, only to find underneath it a statue of Mary with the Child Jesus, wrapped in a stone box and presumably hidden there since the destruction of the church decades earlier.
The episode was taken as a sign to re-build the church, and the statue (on the pedestal, above) has been the object of veneration there since.
Notre-Dame-de-Romigier - Manosque (Provence), France CRW_6436rt
(Our Lady of the Bramble)
After the razing of the town by Moors around 900 A.D., the site was largely abandoned for several decades. In 973, a farmer was ploughing to clear a field where the church had once stood, when his cattle stopped, knelt by a bramble bush (roumi, in Provençal), and would no longer advance. The farmer thus dug up the bush himself, only to find underneath it a statue of Mary with the Child Jesus, wrapped in a stone box and presumably hidden there since the destruction of the church decades earlier.
The episode was taken as a sign to re-build the church, and the statue (on the pedestal, above) has been the object of veneration there since.