Sitting at the mouth of the Couesnon river, off the coast at Avranches, Mont St-Michel looks like a rather bad architectural pile up, not unlike a reject from the ‘Great British Bake Off’. Today, of course, it is an icon of France, one of the country’s most instantly recognisable landmarks, attracting millions of visitors each year who come to expend disproportionate amounts of cash on parking, food and drink, and dubious souvenirs.
In the good old days, you could drive almost to the gates of the island town, and pay a lot less for the privilege of leaving your car stuck in the mud, or to be washed away by the incoming tide if you got your timing wrong. Now you park a kilometre or so away, and pay €12.50 (2015) to leave your car in relative safety. But, to be fair, that €12.50 does get everyone (except dogs) free rides on the shuttle out and (hopefully) back along a new elevated causeway that is indirectly doing much to regenerate the original state of the bay and its island.
In prehistoric times, the Mont was just a minor bump on an expanse of dry land over which prehistoric man may have hunted buffalo, woolly mammoth, deer and moose, and been hunted in turn by sabre-toothed tiger and an assortment of beasties for whom mankind was simply a tasty snack taken in the al fresco dining tradition that was to characterise latter-day France. Then, as sea levels rose and erosion kicked in, outcrops of leucogranite started to appear, having resisted the attentions of the sea rather better than elsewhere nearby. One such came to be known as Mont Tombe.
And so it remained until in 708 Aubert, the bishop of Avranches, on what liquid medication we know not, dreamt an encounter with the archangel Michael, who instructed him to build a church on the island. Three times the archangel instructed the bishop, finally, it is said, burning a hole in the bishop’s skull to drive home the merits of obedience.