Chapel Consolation of the Imprinted

Planted west of the former village bowl, on the corner with the Dreefstraat part of the route of the former heirweg from Ghent to Dendermonde. Small, sloping detached chapel flanked by two large lime trees, at the back adjacent to the side façade of a younger house.
Exact construction date is not known. According to cartographic data, this chapel identified as "Chapelle Ste Marie" is at least from the first half of the 19th century (see representation on the Vandermaelen map of ca. 1847-1848 and the Popp map of around 1860). Based on style features, this chapel may be older. The Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage dates the chapel between 1791 and 1810.
According to the land registry archive, the chapel belonged circa 1880 to Theodoor Pieter Frans Janssens – Beeckman, manufacturer and owner of Janssens Castle (Margote number 44) and his relatives. However, local historiography attributes this chapel to Alphonse Janssens de Varebeke and his wife Coleta De Schrijver. They would have bequeathed it to their daughter Josepha-Marie-Colette Janssens de Varebeke who in turn sold it to Kamiel De Both, related to the tenants of the adjacent farm founded in 1880. The chapel is now privately owned.
Sober neoclassical small devotional chapel with a rectangular floor plan, flat choir closure and crowning gable roof with black tiles and usual iron top cross. Simple whitewashed brick construction on picked plinth with beautiful façade in neoclassical style with a stucco door frame with pilasters, entablature and triangular pediment with semicircular traced oculus. The inscription "Consolation of the Imprinted" in the entablature refers to one of the duties of Mary and refers to an ancient Marian devotion. Green painted rectangular front door with glazed door light and wooden lintel; round-arched windows with iron tracery and coloured glass in both side facades.
Interior with plastered and painted barrel vault. Back wall completely occupied by a sober masonry altar with round-arched framed statue niche in neoclassical style with two pilasters on rectangular pedestals with Doric capitals and a profiled arched field. At the center is a polychrome statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, on a rocky ground with rose buds at her feet, on top of a pedestal with the painted inscription: "Ave Maria". The original 18th-century polychrome wooden statue of Our Lady with Child trampling a snake is no longer preserved in the chapel for safety reasons.

Stichting Open Kerken