Saint-Léger Church, Cheylade

The Saint-Léger church of Cheylade, a small French commune in the Cantal, is a Romanesque religious building erected in the 12th century, ruined during the Hundred Years War, rebuilt and reworked several times between the 15th and 17th centuries, then touched up again in the 19th century.

Consecrated to Léger d'Autun and dedicated to Catholic worship, the church belonged for a long time to the bishopric of Clermont, but since the French Revolution it has been under the diocese of Saint-Flour.

Of modest conception and size, it is like many churches in the region built of volcanic stone, with a slate roof. If the interior, almost without sculpted ornaments, has very few remarkable pieces of furniture or works of art, it is distinguished on the other hand by a very original wooden coffered ceiling: 1,360 squares painted probably in the 18th century with polychrome motifs, of a naïve workmanship but impregnated with Christian symbols. It is these paintings, done on the three vaults by an anonymous artist, that allowed the classification of the church of Saint-Léger de Cheylade as a historical monument in 1963.