The Drie Linden Chapel Lindens

The chapel is named after the trees. Kapel Drie Linden, the chapel of the three lindens, stands on a sharp triangle of ground at a Wilsele crossroads with a lime on each flank, and it was raised in honour of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ter Linde, Our Lady of the Linden. Whether these three are the trees it was named for, nobody has established. The chapel is thought to date from the last quarter of the eighteenth century, built by Dominicus Jozef Hyacint Nelis, a professor who bought the Bleydenberg estate across the road in 1773. It was damaged during the French Revolution years and reconsecrated in 1829 with a new statue of Mary. It reached the land registry only in 1865, by which time the municipality of Wilsele owned it. In 1951 a road adjustment rounded off the sharp point of the plot and brought the chapel closer to passing traffic than its builder can have intended. The lindens themselves are recorded as Tilia and nothing further. No age, no girth, no species beyond the genus, no planting record anywhere. This is an entry you visit as one thing, a small roadside chapel with three trees standing around it. If anyone in Wilsele knows when the limes went in, we would like to hear it.