Mont Saint-Michel

Mont Saint-Michel (week 2)

You couldn't tell by these pictures (we have others where you can tell), but Mont Saint-Michel is one of the most-visited spots in France, with several million visitors a year.  It was warm and (mostly) sunny for our day, so the tourists were spread pretty thick.

This fortified abbey is built on a rock out in the middle of the tidal flats.  When the tide comes in, the place is an island.  They are doing a lot of work to build a new environmentally responsible access road and in restoring the plaster and stonework.  Parts of the abbey date to the 10th century.  It is very high and the only way up is the traditional way: your own two feet.  The boys were quite impressed by the views from the top.  The tour winds through various chapels and halls and is well laid out to keep the flow of traffic moving.  We especially liked the giant wheel - basically a hamster wheel for monks, used to turn a pulley to draw heavy objects up into the abbey from below.  We also got to see part of a mass that was going on in the main chapel.

As you can see, it is mostly of the austere type - plain stone, even the chapels are unadorned, and very little stained-glass (only in one chapel of the 8-10 halls and chapels that we saw).