Lessoc

Lessoc holds the flank of the Intyamon, the valley by which the Sarine comes down towards the Gruyère, a little over 800 metres above sea level. Its houses crowd around a square where an octagonal fountain stands: it dates from 1796, carries a bulb set on stone piers — a form of which no other surviving example is known — and a legend has attached itself to that roof. An independent village until 2002, Lessoc joined Albeuve, Montbovon and Neirivue that year in the commune of Haut-Intyamon.

Stone explains part of the village. Several quarries were worked here, one of them for tufa, but the best known yielded what is called locally the Lessoc 'marble': a grey-white limestone veined with green, used for building in the village and in the region, and from which the fountain on the square is cut. The church of Saint Martin, raised between 1627 and 1635, opens through a porch-tower and holds furnishings of the 19th century. North of the village, at the place called le Buth, the chapel of the Roc — or Notre-Dame-des-Neiges — is an octagonal building of 1684 with a Baroque altar; the Grange-Neuve farm beside it bears the date 1688.

The name is Lecho in the Fribourg dialect and has varied a great deal: Lessoz in 1231, Les Soz in 1237, Lessot around 1352; a pre-Roman origin is judged likely. In the Middle Ages the place belonged to the county of Gruyère, under the banner and castellany of Montsalvens. The lords of Corbières, who held many goods here in the 12th century, ceded them in 1278 to Pierre II of Gruyère. Freed from mortmain in 1396, the inhabitants obtained their own justice, which remained dependent on the banneret of Gruyères.

Why this place is remarkable

Lessoc can be read in its stone and in its square. The local quarry yielded a grey-white limestone veined with green that reappears in the village walls and across the region, and it is from that stone that the octagonal fountain on the square was cut in 1796 — capped with a bulb on piers, a form of which no other example survives. The village also took close to two centuries to obtain its parish: demanded from the end of the 16th century, the separation from Grandvillard came about only in 1643.

History and origin

The first mention of Lessoc appears in the Rougemont charter of 1115, which records the gift, by Count Wilerius to the priory of Rougemont, of land belonging to a serf named Martinus del Suc. A chapel dedicated to Saint Martin, near the present church, is attested from 1365. The village depended first on the parish of Broc, probably until the 12th century, then on that of Grandvillard, from which it sought to detach itself from the end of the 16th century; the separation became effective only in 1643, when the church was built. The source contradicts itself on this point: elsewhere it dates the building to 1627-1635.