Mont-Saint-Michel

The story

Stand on the bridge and look. A village climbs round the bottom of the rock. Above it are walls with no windows, then walls with many windows, then a church, then a spire, then a gold figure with a sword, 157 metres above the sea. Each layer was added by a different century.

The story starts in 708, when a bishop built a small chapel here to the archangel Michael. Monks came in 966. The church at the top was begun in 1023. In China these are the years of the Tang (618–907) and the Northern Song (960–1127).

Close by, with a page of its own: Itsukushima Shrine.

What is here

The island is a village with an abbey on top. Only the abbey has a ticket.

If you have one minute

In the cloister, at the top

You have climbed about 350 steps. This garden is on the roof of a building three floors high, and that building stands against the side of a cliff. Nothing is under you but two other rooms and then rock.

Look at the little columns. They stand in two rows, and the rows are out of step, so that each column of the back row is seen between two of the front. It makes the arcade seem to move as you walk. There are 137 of them.

A cloister is normally closed on all four sides. Go to the west side. Three arches there open on nothing but sea and sky. The monks meant to build one more hall beyond them and never did.

The monks called this building the Merveille, the Marvel. It was finished in 1228, in seventeen years.

Things people often get wrong

"The tide comes in as fast as a galloping horse." The line is credited to Victor Hugo and every guide repeats it. Measured, the front of the tide moves at about six kilometres an hour at most, the pace of a quick walk. That is still faster than a person can cross soft sand, and people have drowned.

"It is always an island." It is an island only for a few hours on a few days each month, at the highest tides. Most of the time it stands on wet sand. Look at a tide table before you choose your day.

"It is in Brittany." It is in Normandy, by a few hundred metres. The river that marks the border reaches the sea just west of the rock. The Bretons have a rhyme about it: the river, in its madness, put the Mount in Normandy.

"The whole island is a ticketed site." The village, the ramparts and the parish church are free and never close. Only the abbey at the top has a ticket.

"Monks still own it." The state owns the abbey. But since 2001 a small community of monks and nuns has lived in it and sings the offices every day, and anyone may attend.

People who stood here

• Aubert (bishop of Avranches, died about 720)He built the first chapel on the rock in 708 and consecrated it the next year.
• William of Normandy and Harold of England (later rivals at Hastings, 1066)In 1064 they rode past the rock together on a campaign into Brittany. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the Mount, and Harold pulling two Norman soldiers out of the quicksand.
• Robert de Torigni (abbot 1154–1186)Under him the abbey had sixty monks and so many books that it was called the City of Books. In 1158 he received the kings of England and France here together.
• Bertrand du Guesclin (constable of France, about 1320–1380; the French soldier-hero of the Hundred Years' War) and Tiphaine RaguenelHe commanded the garrison. In 1365 he built a house on the rock for his wife Tiphaine, a learned woman who studied the stars, to keep her safe while he fought in Spain.
• Louis d'Estouteville (captain of the Mount from 1425)The English held all Normandy and besieged the rock for some ten years. He held it with 119 knights. On 17 June 1434 he beat off the last assault and kept two of the English guns. They are still at the gate.
• Louis XI (king of France, reigned 1461–1483)He came three times as a pilgrim, founded the knightly Order of Saint Michael in 1469 with this abbey as its seat, and sent an iron cage for prisoners, hung from a vault so that it swung when the man inside moved.
• Auguste Blanqui (revolutionary, 1805–1881)He was a prisoner here from 1840 to 1844 for rising against the king, with his comrade Armand Barbès. In all he spent more than thirty years of his life in prisons.
• Victor Hugo (French writer, author of Les Misérables)He came in June 1836, when it was a prison, and wrote in a letter that it was a toad in a reliquary. He spent years demanding that the prison be closed and the abbey repaired. Later he called it the pyramid of France.
• Guy de Maupassant (French writer of short stories)He came several times. His story The Horla (1887) opens with a visit to the Mount, where a monk tells the narrator that the wind, too, is something powerful that no one has seen.
• Annette Poulard (innkeeper, 1851–1931)She came as the maid of the architect who was restoring the abbey, married the baker's son and opened an inn in 1888. Pilgrims arrived at any hour, wet from the sands, so she made the one dish that is ready in minutes: an omelette beaten to a froth.
• Emmanuel Frémiet (French sculptor, 1824–1910)He made the gilded copper archangel that was set on the new spire in 1897. In 2016 a helicopter lifted it off to be gilded again.
• Henry Adams (American historian, 1838–1918)His book Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904) made the rock known to American readers as the place to understand the eleventh century.
• Terrence Malick (American film director)His film To the Wonder (2012) opens here. The two lovers climb to the cloister and then walk out on the wet sand at low tide, which gives under their feet like a trampoline. The title is the monks' name for the building.

Go deeper: nine stops, from the gate to the cloister and back to the sea

Stops 1 to 3 and 9 are free. Stops 4 to 8 are inside the abbey and need the ticket.

1. The bridge and the tide

Until 1879 you reached the rock across the sands, at low tide, with a guide. Then a causeway was built. It was a solid bank, and it stopped the tide from washing round. Sand piled up, grass grew, and by 2000 the rock was becoming part of the land.

The bridge you are on opened in 2014. It stands on thin legs so that water passes under it, and a dam on the river now releases a flush at each tide to carry the sand out. The causeway was dug away in 2015.

The difference between low and high water here can reach fourteen metres, the most on the mainland of Europe. On the biggest tides the sea covers the last stretch of the road for an hour or so, and the rock is an island again.

2. The gates and the English guns

There are three gates, one behind another. In the first courtyard lie two fat iron guns. The English left them on the sands in 1434.

The third gate, the King's Gate, has a drawbridge and a slot for a portcullis. The town never fell.

3. The street

One street winds up the rock. It has sold things to pilgrims for a thousand years: once lead badges and shells, now biscuits. About two dozen people live on the island today.

Halfway up is the parish church. A statue of Joan of Arc stands at its door. She never came here. But the voice she said she heard was Saint Michael's, and in her lifetime this was the one place in the north of France the English had not taken.

To escape the crowd, leave the street by a side stair towards the sea and walk up along the ramparts.

4. The great stair and the terrace

Inside the abbey gate a long stair climbs between the church and the abbot's lodgings. Bridges cross overhead. Defenders could close it at both ends.

At the top you come out on a wide terrace. The church used to cover it. Three bays of the nave were pulled down after a fire in 1776. Look at the paving: some stones carry numbers and marks cut by the masons to be paid for their work.

From the edge you see the whole bay. The small rock to the north is Tombelaine, where the English had their fort.

5. The church on four crypts

The top of the rock is a point, too small for a church. So the builders of 1023 first made four crypts round the point, and laid the church across them like a table top.

The nave is from the eleventh century: round arches, thick walls, a wooden ceiling to save weight. Now walk forward. The far end is tall, pointed and full of light. The old choir fell down in 1421, in the middle of the war, and this one was begun twenty-five years later.

The spire and its archangel are from 1897.

6. The Marvel: cloister and refectory

Next to the cloister is the hall where the monks ate. Stand at the door. The room is bright, but you can see no window in the side walls. Walk forward and narrow windows appear one by one, each set deep between columns. The builders wanted light without weakening a wall that carries a wide roof.

The monks ate in silence while one of them read aloud from the pulpit in the south wall.

7. The Marvel: the halls below

Under the refectory is the Guests' Hall, where the abbot received kings. Under the cloister is the hall called the Knights' Hall.

No knights met in it. It was probably the monks' workroom, where they copied books. That is why it has two huge fireplaces: ink freezes and fingers stiffen. The thick columns carry the cloister above.

The rule of the building is social. The poor were fed on the bottom floor, the noble guests on the middle floor, and the monks lived on the top, nearest heaven.

8. The wheel

In a room that was once the monks' bone house stands a wooden wheel six metres across. It dates from about 1820, when the abbey was a prison. Five or six prisoners walked inside it, like squirrels, to wind a rope that pulled a sledge of food up the cliff.

The prison held up to six hundred people at a time. It closed in 1863.

Saint-Michel surgissait, seul sur les flots amers, Chéops de l'occident, pyramide des mers.

Saint Michael rose, alone on the bitter waves, the Cheops of the West, the pyramid of the seas.

Victor Hugo, "Près d'Avranches", in Les Quatre Vents de l'esprit (1881); our translation

9. The ramparts and the sands

Go down by the ramparts. From the towers you look straight out over the sands.

The grey flats look firm. In places they are a mix of sand and water that holds a foot like wet cement. People do cross them, barefoot, with a licensed guide who knows where the channels have moved since last week.

On the grass at the edge of the bay sheep graze on plants that the sea covers at high tide. Their meat tastes faintly of salt and is sold under its own name.

The same shot: the picture on every poster is taken from the dam, two kilometres south, where the river points straight at the rock. Get off the shuttle at the stop called Place du Barrage. At dusk the lights come on and the rock doubles in the water. In the cartoon film Tangled (2010) the island city of the lost princess was drawn after this view, and the designers of the film The Return of the King (2003) have named it as a model for their white city on a rock.