Le Mont Saint Michel

The Abbey

The last few weeks have been very busy with work, job applications, and (to a much smaller extent) personal research project(s), meaning that 1) we haven't been going to cool places or doing much that's terribly interesting and worth blogging about and 2) we haven't had much time to write about what we have been doing. So here's a long overdue entry about our day-trip to Mont Saint-Michel two weeks ago. 

View of the mainland from the
ramparts, now with silt!

First, if you've seen any pictures of France beyond the standard ones of Paris (the Eiffel Tower, Champes Elysees, Notre Dame, etc.), you've probably seen a picture of Mont Saint-Michel, although you may not have realized it. (Here's a good picture of it, courtesy of Wikipedia.) It's a medieval abbey built on a rocky island just off the coast of Normandy in the English Channel at the mouth of a river. Historically, when the tide came in, the island was cut off from the mainland (although a causeway was built in 1879 allowing permanent access to the abbey). It was a monastery and a pilgrimage site through the Middle Ages, but by the time of the French Revolution, very few monks lived there. The abbey was closed and turned into a state prison, but by 1836, a campaign had begun to restore the monastery (Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables was one of the campaign's leaders). The prison was closed in 1863 and the site was declared a historical monument in 1874. In the last hundred years or so (especially after the construction of the causeway), the strait between the island the mainland has begun to silt up. Right now, the French government is engaged in a massive construction project to remove the silt and replace the causeway with a kind of floating bridge, in the process allowing the river to flush out the silt and allow the island to again be completely surrounded by water at high tide.

A view of the street from the ramparts.

For the next few months, the regional bus company is running a special deal: round-trip tickets from Rennes to Mont Saint-Michel for only 10 euros, so we took advantage of that. Unfortunately, we weren't the only ones traveling there that day. Our bus was full of Japanese and Spanish tourists and there were even more tourists already at the site. (For the record, about 3 million people a year visit the abbey, so I guess this was just a normal day for that!) What that meant for us is that we didn't even bother trying to get into the abbey; the line was too long. However, there's a little town built at the foot of the abbey at the base of the island, and we spent our afternoon walking around there.

Saint Michael in the parish church.

The parish cemetery.

The town is built in a couple of small semi-circles of different heights around the base of the mount. There's only one, very steep street winding around the side of the island with shops and restaurants on either side. We walked around the ramparts of the city, getting some nice views of the mainland and of the bay. We also walked along the street, doing some shopping, having a bit of ice cream, and trying to dodge some of the many other tourists. We also visited the small parish church and its attached cemetery. Essentially, we walked/climbed any part of the island we could get to that wasn't the abbey itself (although we saw plenty of the outside of the abbey since it dominates the whole island). It was a lovely afternoon and we got quite a work-out climbing up and down the street!

The side of the abbey through
an arrow slit in the ramparts.

We've decided that we're going to go back in December, during the week off we have between the end of classes and the time we leave to return to the US. Lisa's thinking of it as a kind of Advent retreat, because our plan is to spend the night at one of the several small hotels actually on the island (there are several other, chain-like hotels on the mainland), go to the evening church service at the parish church, wake up early the next morning and go to the morning service in the abbey (there has been a community of monks in residence since 2001). We can then visit the main part of the abbey itself (which opens at 9:30) before the buses of tourists start to arrive! We hope at that point to have more pictures and better stories to share about Mont Saint-Michel.

(PS This says it was posted by Lisa (me).  I did the arranging of the photos, but Aaron did the writing. Remember, you can always click on the pictures to see them larger!)