Roe

LA ROE

ABBAYE DE LA ROE

After founding the abbey of Fontevraud (Maine-et-Loire), in the former diocese of Poitiers, the Benedictine monk Robert d'Arbrissel became archdeacon of the diocese of Rennes. His radical reforms of the clergy met with fierce resistance and he had to resign to take refuge first at Angers then in the forest of Craon (Mayenne). With the companions that had followed him, he founded the abbey of La Roë in 1096 ("Roë" is the medieval form of "roue" - wheel - and is pronounced like "raw") The monks' cells formed a circle round the church (a wheel) like the lands cleared in concentric circles round the monastery.

At the very centre, the abbey church surrounded by the cells of the monks - at one time they were more than 80 - and the concentric circles of cleared lands

Water colour representing the abbey church before its decline

Left: on entering the village of La Roë, you immediately notice the tall outlines of a rather strange-looking edifice - a massive tower surmounting a neatly sectioned nave. It looks like an architect's blueprint - an elevation - but the stones are real! It is, in fact, what is left of the Gothic chancel destroyed during the Revolution, which serves as a kind of blind chevet to the abbey church founded in the 11th century. Right: still standing, a section of the missing chancel's north wall pierced with a pointed-arched window

If you start walking round the church clockwise, you will discover a walled-up Gothic window with its delicate tracery, the rectangular tower erected above the crossing, the south arm of the transept and its buttresses that make use of "roussard" sandstone as a decorative element and the beginning of the south wall of the nave. Round-arched windows alternate with Gothic ponted-arched ones

You then walk along the south wall made more colourful by the use of the local "roussard" sandstone and pierced with Gothic and Romanesque windows

Behind you, what might be the ruins of one of the monks' cells, which were arranged in a circle round the church

Left: door giving access to the south transept, decorated with carved pellets.

Right: After skirting the more modern building, which you can see on the right, you can admire the fine Romanesque west façade

A section of the north wall with a niche - unfortunately empty

INTERIOR

Nave, chancel and the wall that serves as a flat chevet

Hardly legible wall painting that might have represented the Virgin in majesty. It is on the east wall of the south transept

Left: angel: close-up of the wall painting.

Right: decorative effect obtained by engraving a herringbone pattern on "roussard" stones whose colour ranges from dark red to light yellow.

ABBAYE DE LA ROE

INTERIOR

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