TriumphAnt

One of our travel guide books refers to the Mont St Michel silhouette as France’s second best-known, the Eiffel Tower being first. And so it was somehow appropriate that it was in silhouette form that the historic Abbey and its island first appeared to us while we were still a few kilometres away, looming out of the late morning mist like some mad cross between Mordor’s Dark Tower and Cinderella’s castle.


Mont St Michel is not so much an Abbey located on an island as it is, in its entirety, an island. Its boundary walls encircle the island to its very edge and, from the moment you step onto the island after crossing the causeway linking it to the mainland, you are at the Abbey’s main gate.

Its location is also in a region of fast-changing tides. So fast, in fact that there are areas of the parking lot posted with signs advising of the high tide time on any given day, supplemented with the especially helpful notice that, if your car is still at this location in a few hours, it will be underwater.


For our part, we left ourselves an open-ended visit and parked on ground that lay above the high tide mark. The modest price you pay for choosing that option is that you are faced with a slightly longer walk to reach the Abbey / island’s front gate.

The guide book we used most often during our trip was possessed of a sense of humour and so we were forewarned that the winding climb leading to the Abbey proper was bounded by dozens of shops and cafés that to this day unabashedly maintain the ancient tradition of happily fleecing pilgrims of every possible form of currency in their possession.

As fans of the Harry Potter movies will instantly recognize, the sellers’ avenue has almost a carbon copy feel of Diagon Alley, the crowded street of shops where the Hogwarts wizards-in-training purchased their array of school supplies, wands, robes and the like. (Leslie and I clearly are not the only ones to have remarked on the parallel.
When, a couple days later, I took a Juno Beach tour with a family from Saskatchewan, they too had been to Mont St Michel and they too told me they were astonished at feeling they had just walked into Diagon Alley. And Googling “Mont St Michel, Diagon Alley” turns up at least a hundred other travellers’ diary comments echoing the feeling.)

The blatant, albeit picturesque commercialism of the lower levels notwithstanding, as you leave the shops behind and move upward into the realm of the Abbey proper, the magnificent Mont St Michel Abbey does not feel like it has been constructed on a rocky island so much as it has morphed from it. If ever a man-made structure could be said to epitomize the literary cliché more typically used to characterize an especially moving sculpture, “born of the living rock”, Mont St Michel is it.

(A brief, obligatory historical aside.) The presence of a structure on the island dates back to the eighth century when Aubert, a bishop of the Norman town of Avranches is supposed to have been visited by St Michael the Archangel*, and founded a monastery on the island to commemorate the visitation. Its present Gothic towers date to 1228. There have been religious occupants ever since, but in surprisingly small numbers, given the immensity of the construction. The present-day community is a dozen or so monks and nuns from the Monastic Fraternity of Jerusalem. Considering that a typical day sees the island crawling with thousands of tourists – tens of thousands in the busy summer season – it hardly seems surprising that the available private monastic space is able to accommodate no more than about 12.

* In a somewhat bizarre bit of reliquary, in Avranches there is a church (Saint Gervais) in which a treasury houses what is purported to be the skull of the now Saint Aubert, complete with a hole where the archangel Michael's finger is supposed to have pierced it (Modern day analysis, however, ascribes the aperture not to the intrusion of a divine digit, but rather to the skull’s having been trepanned by a well-intentioned physician of the day.)

One aspect of the site that both Leslie and I found puzzling, and not a little disappointing, was that its powers-that-be have elected to hang massive fabric photographs at several places that bore no relation to the site itself, but rather showed other great climbs, staircases and mountain trails from all over the world.
One of our guidebooks did note that the Abbey at one time was home to a number of beautiful and enormous tapestries so I suppose that the fabric photos’ presence might have been a manifestation of someone’s intention to try to recapture some of that former glory by covering several of the larger rock surfaces. But to us it just seemed kind of crass.



The climb up the staircases and steeply pitched pathways does come with constant rewards – the views from the upper levels looking back down over other points of the island, the distant countryside and the tidal flats are spectacular. In the last one, Leslie is contemplating the view.
If you enlarge it, you can see a distant trail of several footprints -- just above the roofline at bottom centre -- leading out onto the flats. It’s a walk that has to be taken in the company of a knowledgeable guide, because there are actual patches of quicksand out on the flats whose muddy grasp can apparently trap an unwary stroller like Krazy Glue.

And in a wonderful surprise, as you approach the top, at one point you abruptly emerge from a dim corridor into this beautiful little courtyard garden.

If you do plan a visit and you can manage it, October is definitely a good time to be at this site. On a couple occasions we were told that it is insanely crowded in the summer months. We bumped into only a few clustered tour groups here and there. The earlier photo of the parking lot shows a lot that is only about 2/3 full. There are three other lots of equal or larger size on the approach to the Abbey and in summer they are all routinely filled.

The drive to and from the Abbey to our gite at Utah Beach through the Norman countryside was also a wonderful road trip. Many roads in that part of the country – especially the more rural ones – are bounded by enormous, centuries-old hedges. While picturesque, they also gave me a much clearer understanding of why it took so long for the Allied armies to break out of their continental toehold on the D-Day beach landing sites and begin the simultaneous push south to Paris and east to, eventually, Berlin. Wartime histories of the post-D-Day struggles in Normandy include frequent reference to the difficulty of trying to advance through “hedgerows” or “bocage”. It is growth fierce enough to stop a tank in its tracks. As Wikipedia sums it up: “Bocage... refers to a terrain of mixed woodland and pasture, with tortuous side-roads and lanes bounded on both sides by banks surmounted with high thick hedgerows which limit visibility. It is the sort of landscape found in England in Devon. In Normandy, it acquired a particular significance during the Battle of Normandy, as it made progress against an entrenched opposition extremely difficult. American soldiers also referred to bocage as ‘hedgerows’.”

Later that evening, when we got back to our temporary home, we took another stroll out to the beach around midnight and discovered just how different it is between low and high tide. Recall my earlier photo of the placid Utah Beach at low tide when I referred to the hundreds of yards of sand the invading Allies had to cross. Contrast that with this same stretch of beach photographed at almost the same point a couple days later during the daylight high tide.
Strolling this area at midnight was not a little eerie. The only lights were those around the Utah Beach memorial and museum, and across the water from lighthouses and a few other distant sources that we took to be Channel shipping traffic. At one point, as we made our way back into the darkness to return to our gite, we both became aware of a presence a few yards off to our left in a field. Shining our flashlight that way produced a sudden rush of galloping horses as several of the animals, who had been quietly grazing in the dark, decided that our light was unfamiliar enough that it should be run away from.

Next: The Utah Visitors Centre and an Internet café built, appropriately enough, on the site of a German communications bunker that later served as the main Allied ship-to-shore communications centre during the invasion.