St Michael's Mount () is a
tidal island located off the
Mount's Bay coast of
Cornwall,
England,
United Kingdom. It is united with the town of
Marazion by a man-made
causeway, passable only at mid to low tide, made of granite setts. The island exhibits a combination of
slate and
granite.
Its Cornish language name — literally, "the grey rock in the wood" — may represent a folk memory of a time before
Mount's Bay was flooded. Certainly, the Cornish name would be an accurate description of the Mount set in woodland. Remains of trees have been seen at low tides following storms on the beach at
Perranuthnoe, but
radiocarbon dating established the submerging of the hazel wood at about 1700 BC. The chronicler
John of Worcester relates under the year 1099 that St. Michael's Mount was located five or six miles from the sea, enclosed in a thick wood, but that on the third day of the nones of November the sea overflowed the land, destroying many towns and drowning many people as well as innumerable oxen and sheep; the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records under the date 11 November 1199, "The sea-flood sprung up to such a height, and did so much harm, as no man remembered that it ever did before". The Cornish legend of
Lyonesse, an ancient kingdom said to have extended from Penwith toward the
Isles of Scilly, also talks of land being inundated by the sea.
In prehistoric times, St. Michael's Mount may have been a port for the
tin trade, and Gavin de Beer made a case for it to be identified with the "tin port" Ictis/Ictin mentioned by
Posidonius.
Historically, St Michael's Mount was a Cornish counterpart of
Mont Saint Michel in
Normandy,
France.
St Michael's Mount is known colloquially by locals as simply
the Mount.
The island today
The chapel is extra-diocesan, and the
castle is the official residence of
Lord St Levan. Many relics, chiefly armour and antique furniture, are preserved in the castle. The chapel of
St Michael, a fifteenth century building, has an embattled tower, in one angle of which is a small turret, which served for the guidance of ships. Chapel Rock, on the beach, marks the site of a
shrine dedicated to the
Virgin Mary, where pilgrims paused to worship before ascending the Mount. A few houses are built on the hillside facing Marazion, and a spring supplies them with water. The harbour, widened in 1823 to allow vessels of 500 tons to enter, has a pier dating from the fifteenth century and subsequently enlarged and restored.
Some studies indicate that any rise in ocean waters as well as existing natural erosion would put some of the Cornwall coast at risk, including St. Michael's Mount.
St Michael's Mount is still owned by the St Aubyn family, but visitor access is controlled by the
National Trust.
There is a row of eight houses at the back of the present village; they were built in 1885 and are known as Elizabeth Terrace. A spring supplies them with water. Some of the houses are occupied by staff working in the castle and elsewhere on the island.
The island cemetery (currently no public access) contains the graves of former residents of the island and several drowned sailors. There are also buildings that were formerly the steward's house, a changing-room for bathers, the stables, the laundry, a barge house, a sail loft (now a restaurant), and two former inns. A former bowling green adjoins one of the buildings.
One of the most noteworthy points of interest on the island is the underground railway, which is still used to transport goods from the harbour up to the castle. It was built by tin miners around 1900, replacing the pack horses which had previously been used. Due to the steep gradient, it cannot be used for passengers. The National Trust currently does not permit public access or viewing of the railway.
The harbour, widened in 1823 to allow vessels of 500 tons to enter, has a pier dating from the fifteenth century which was subsequently enlarged and restored. Queen Victoria landed at the harbour from the royal yacht in 1846, and a brass inlay of her footstep can be seen at the top of the landing stage. King Edward VII's footstep is also visible near the bowling-green. In 1967 the Queen Mother entered the harbour in a pinnace from the royal yacht Britannia.
Geology
The rock exposures around St Michael's Mount provide an opportunity to see many features of the
geology of Cornwall in a single locality. The mount is made of the uppermost part of a
granite intrusion into
metamorphosed Devonian mudstones or
pelites. The granite is itself mineralised with a well-developed sheeted
greisen vein system.
Granites
There are two types of granite visible on the mount. Most of the intrusion is a
tourmaline muscovite granite which is variably
porphyritic. This is separated from a
biotite muscovite granite by
pegmatites.
Devonian Pelites
Originally laid down as mudstones these pelites were regionally metamorphosed and deformed (mainly
folded here) by the
Variscan orogeny. They were then affected by the
intrusion of the granite, which caused further contact metamorphism, locally forming a
hornfels, and mineralisation.
Mineralisation
The best developed mineralisation is found within the uppermost part of the granite itself in the form of sheeted greisen veins. These steep W-E trending veins are thought to have formed by
hydraulic fracturing when the fluid pressure at the top of the granite reached a critical level. The granite was fractured and the fluids altered the granite by replacing
feldspars with
quartz and muscovite. The fluids were also rich in
boron,
tin and
tungsten and tourmaline,
wolframite and
cassiterite are common in the greisen veins. As the area cooled the veins became open to fluids from the surrounding
country rock and these deposited sulphides e.g.
chalcopyrite and
stannite. Greisen veins are also locally developed within the pelites.
History
St Michael's Mount in 1900
The Mount may be the
Mictis of
Timaeus, mentioned by
Pliny the Elder in his
Naturalis Historia (IV:XVI.104), and the
Ictis of
Diodorus Siculus. Both men had access to the now lost texts of the ancient Greek geographer
Pytheas, who visited the island in the fourth century BC. If this is true, it is one of the earliest identified locations in the whole of western
Europe and particularly on the island of Britain.
It may have been the site of a monastery in the 8th - early 11th centuries and
Edward the Confessor gave it to the
Norman abbey of
Mont Saint Michel. It was a
priory of that abbey until the dissolution of the
alien houses by
Henry V, when it was given to the abbess and Convent of Syon at
Isleworth,
Middlesex. It was a resort of
pilgrims, whose devotions were encouraged by an indulgence granted by
Pope Gregory in the 11th century.
The monastic buildings were built during the 12th century but in 1425 as an alien monastery it was suppressed.
Henry Pomeroy captured the Mount, on behalf of
Prince John, in the reign of
Richard I.
John de Vere, 13th Earl of Oxford, seized and held it during a siege of 23 weeks against 6,000 of
Edward IV's troops in 1473.
Perkin Warbeck occupied the Mount in 1497. Humphry Arundell, governor of St Michael's Mount, led the rebellion of 1549. During the reign of Queen
Elizabeth, it was given to
Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, by whose son it was sold to Sir Francis Basset. During the
Civil War, Sir Arthur Basset, brother of Sir Francis, held the Mount against the parliament until July 1646.
In 1755 the
Lisbon earthquake caused a
tsunami to strike the Cornish coast over 1,000 miles away. The sea rose six feet in 10 minutes at St Michael's Mount, ebbed at the same rate, and continued to rise and fall for five hours. The 19th-century French writer
Arnold Boscowitz claimed that "great loss of life and property occurred upon the coasts of Cornwall."
In the late 19th century the skeleton of an
anchorite was discovered when a chamber was found beneath the castle's chapel. When the anchorite died of illness or natural causes, the chamber was sealed off and became his tomb. The Mount was sold in 1659 to Colonel John St Aubyn. His descendant, Lord St Levan, continues to be the "tenant" of the Mount but has ceased to be resident there, his nephew, James St Aubyn, taking up residency and management of the Mount in 2004.
Little is known about the village before the beginning of 18th century, save that there were a few fishermen's cottages and monastic cottages. After improvements to the harbour in 1727, St Michael's Mount became a flourishing seaport, and by 1811 there were 53 houses and four streets, and the island's population was about 300. There were three schools, a Wesleyan chapel, and three public houses, mostly used by visiting sailors. The village went into decline following major improvements to nearby Penzance harbour and the extension of the railway to Penzance in 1852, and many of the houses and buildings were demolished.
Local government
St Michael's Mount
St Michael's Mount forms its own
civil parish for local government purposes. Currently, this takes the form of a parish meeting as opposed to a parish council (that is, a yearly meeting of electors that does not elect councillors). The current chairman of the St Michael's Mount parish meeting is James St Aubyn.
In popular culture
"Mt Saint Michel + Saint Michaels Mount" is the title of an experimental electronic track by musician
Aphex Twin, who grew up in Cornwall.
St. Michael's Mount was one of the Locations featured in the
BBC One "Balloon" Idents.
St Michael's Mount was also used in the 2003 film
Johnny English as the exterior of the character
Pascal Sauvage's French chateau.
Images
See also
