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When there was a regular community of monks here, the ancient pilgrimage to Nôtre Dame de l'Oder was kept up, and near the top of the via crucis, which forms a long succession of zigzags upon the bare rock, a dark shrub or small tree allied to box may be seen railed off with an image of the Virgin against it.
High on the crupper of this saddle is perched a ruined castle, with a church below it, and a cross and a graveyard on the cliff's edge; high on the pommel you climb to another cross, beside a dilapidated house of religion, the Priory of Notre Dame de l'Oder.
The tall thyme, the garden species in the North, had already flowered, but the common wild thyme of England, the serpolet of the French, was beginning to spread its purple over the stony ground. A great wooden cross stood upon the ridge, and hard by, buffeted by the wintry winds and blazed upon by the summer sun, was the ancient priory of Nôtre Dame de l'Oder. I ring the bell.
According to the legend, a Crusader returning from the Holy Land made a pilgrimage to the sanctuary upon these rocks at Ambialet, and planted on the hill the staff he had brought with him. This grew to a tree, to which the people of the country gave the name of oder. In course of time it came to be so venerated that Nôtre Dame d'Ambialet was changed to Nôtre Dame de l'Oder.
"'Toute la Basse Silesie, la riviere de Neisse pour limite, la ville de Neisse a nous, aussi bien que Glatz; de l'autre cote de l'Oder l'ancien limite entre les Duches de Brieg et d'Oppeln. Namslau a nous. Les affaires de religion IN STATU QUO. Point de dependance de la Boheme; cession eternelle. En echange nous n'irons pas plus loin.
Such a revenue, when the bare needs of the body have been met, does not leave much for satisfying a literary appetite. The priory of Nôtre Dame de l'Oder was founded in the twelfth or thirteenth century by the Benedictines, but a church already existed on the spot as early, it is supposed, as the eighth century.
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