Our accommodation is 3k from the mont with a view across the famous salt grass flats. They stretch for a km or so before reaching the sea that surrounds the rocky island upon which the village and cathedral have been built.
The region is famous for its lamb, sheep that feed on this grass are herded through the village every morning from their barn and out into the fields. They return through the village each evening, it really is a sight to see.
We caught a shuttle bus from an enormous car park, just one of many which is an indicator of how vast the crowds must be each summer, but luckily for us only a few thousand people were there today.
The view is overpowering from a distance, and as you walk through the village at the base of the mont, (which Max dubbed 'thieves alley'), there are a hundred gift shops selling all kinds of cheap and expensive souvenirs. After a steep walk through the street you arrive at the base of a few hundred steps which wind their way through chapels and halls and crypts and cloisters until you reach as far as high as you are permitted to walk today. From the battlements you can see for miles, a view which has hardly changed over the ages. Vast flats of silt and quicksand at low tide and a shallow ocean at high tide. It is easy to imagine the pilgrims coming to pray to the Arch angel St Michael, or to imagine the Normans battling and horses caught in the quick sand, or the encampments of the English in the 30 year siege.
Today it is once again a holy place, all be it, the most visited site in France.
Built between the 11th and 16th centuries and perched on a rocky islet in the midst of vast sandbanks exposed to powerful tides between Normandy and Brittany stands the 'Wonder of the West', a Gothic-style Benedictine abbey dedicated to the archangel St Michael, and the village that grew up in the shadow of its great walls.
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