Textures

Mont Saint-Michel

Mont Saint-Michel

Le Mont Saint-Michel, probably France's most famous abbey, rises improbably from a small, rocky island, now connected to land by a causeway. The island is similar geologically to the Mont Dol, just in the bay rather than on land. Mont Saint-Michel's first church was built by Aubert, Bishop of Avranches in 709. Benedictine monks began living on the island in 966, and a larger church was built before the end of the millenium. This was replaced in the 11th Century by a Romanesque church, which was, over the course of subsequent centuries, extended, enlarged, and fortified, with the later additions in the Gothic style. A bustling pilgrimage point during the Middle Ages, after the French Revolution the Abbey was turned into a prison. Dilapidated and unused, the abbey was was declared a historic monument in 1874. Restored in the late 19th Century, the abbey and its island have regained their status as an icon of France.

The causeway connecting Mont Saint-Michel and the mainland serves as both road and parking lot. Over the years, the causeway has amplified the silting of the bay; the government plans to replace the causeway with a bridge, so that the bay's waters, driven by the tides, can flow more freely and return Mont Saint-Michel to being an island rather than a peninsula.

From the abbey's windows, you can look out at the coast as it encroaches on the island.

From the island's ramparts, you can look out into the bay, which divides Brittany from Normandy.

Crossing through the ramparts at the island's main gate, you soon start climbing up the main street, which has commerce and bustle that recall the street as pilgrims must have found it in the Middle Ages. Hotels, restaurants, various museums, and souvenir shops clamor for the tourist's attention.

The abbey was built at the island's summit. Its central part is supported by the rock, and its outer parts are supported by foundations that have been built up around the rock. The whole point of the edifice is to reach toward the heavens. Of course, this means that visitors, like the pilgrims before them, have to climb a long ways to reach the abbey.


After reaching the top of the street, you climb flights of stairs outside the abbey.






Inside the abbey's walls, you climb more flights of stairs.




And then you wind between the abbot's residence and the foundations of the abbey itself, rising from the island's rock.

The abbey was built of granite brought by boat from the Chausey Islands. That must have been the easy part, compared to getting all that rock up the mountain.

When the abbey was converted to a prison, a hauling system was installed. This involved a buttress that served as a track for a heavy wooden sledge, which was raised up the track by a large wheel in which five or six prisoners would walk, as if they were in a large hampster-wheel.

The 19th-Century sledge is no longer used. To its left is a modern cable-car system, which during our visit this was being used to lift supplies for a meeting of personnel of a major French bank.

Visitors to the abbey, alas, are not hauled up on cable-cars. But when, after all that climbing, you reach the top, you get to see one of the masterpieces of religious architecture. The facade is actually more recent than the rest of the abbey. Part of the nave had been removed, and this Romanesque revival front then enclosed the remaining part of the nave. You can see the outlines of the old nave in the raised stone of the platform.

Inside the abbey, you walk through the Romanesque nave, with the Gothic choir ahead of you. In the Middle Ages, this now-sober space would have been much more colorful, with painted walls, tapestries, devotional objects, and so forth.

The choir is unusually light, especially with the morning sun streaming in from the east.

Of course, looking light doesn't make it light. On the level below, the choir is supported by massive, closely set pillars.

I mentioned that parts of the edifice other than the center of the abbey were built up on foundations surrounding the central rock. The most striking part of this is the Merveille, the marvel, which contained the living quarters for the monks. The three stories of the Merveille, which was built up on the north side of the abbey, were constructed in a mere 25 years.

At the top floor of the Merveille, alongside the nave, you find the cloister, which is itself a marvel of Gothic grace, with its twin rows of slender offset columns. In her blog posting about Mont Saint-Michel, Susie included photos of some of the wonderful spandrels above the columns' capitals.

Next to the cloister, also atop the Merveille, is the refectory, whose many tall windows, seen here from the outside, bring in a great diffuse light.

From the inside of the refectory, the windows' deep insets make it so that you see only a few of the windows directly; the rest of the windows light the room, unseen. This produces an overall effect that combines solidity, grace, warmth, and light.

The abbey also has spaces with much less grace but still with interest. Its development over the years, with different styles, designers, and needs, led to odd, left-over and service spaces, such as this little courtyard that recalls M.C. Escher.

The abbey also has elements of unexpected charm, such as this wall along the west side.

As you leave the abbey to return to the city below, you pass through the abbey's gardens, on the north side, near the foundations of the Merveille. The gardens, with their plantings and walks overlooking the bay, provide some moments of serenity before you dive back into the street and its crowds.

Dinan

Yesterday Susie blogged about the Breton city of Dinan. Here's a little more on Dinan from my perspective. Dinan, despite being miles inland, is a port city. It lies on the Rance at the point where the river is no longer tidal. The city retains much of its ramparts, along which visitors can walk.

From the ramparts you can look down into the valley of the Rance and the port of Dinan.

The old center of the city has a lot of medieval charm, with half-timbers and corbels.

Medieval Dinan has many buildings with arcades, where merchants would display their wares.

For many years, the Tour de l'Horloge, a 15th-Century tower, served first as a look-out tower for fires in the city, then at the start of the 16th Century as bell and clock tower, and the city's administration and archives. The tower was Dinan's town hall until the French Revolution.




Climbing to the top takes 158 steps, of three different kinds. The first steps are on a circular stone staircase.





Then you go up successive flights of wooden stairs that circle the inside of the tower.


As you near the top, a sign warns you that the bells ring the hour and quarter-hours. And from the top of the wooden stairs you climb what is essentially a ladder to the rooftop. Getting out on the roof is itself an adventure, as there's not much onto which to hold as you transition from the ladder. The roof, which goes around the spire, is narrow, and the railing is not as high as you might prefer.

Sticking to the inside of the rooftop, I took pictures of the wonderful panorama of Dinan and its surrounding countryside. Here's a picture of the Sant-Sauveur basilica, which turns out to be a truly interesting building.

The exterior of the basilica provides some clues as to its peculiarity. The facade's doors are Romanesque but the windows are flamboyant Gothic. The porch on the right side is Gothic, but (and you can't tell this from the photo), the rest of that side of the basilica is Romanesque.

And, sure enough, when you enter the basilica, you find that entire right side of the nave is Romanesque and the entire left side is Gothic.

Dol and Mont Dol

From the flat Breton countryside southwest of the Mont Saint Michel rises le Mont Dol, a rocky outrcropping that, in its form, is a small mountain. Mont Dol's summit provides outstanding views and supports a number of interesting structures, including a windmill. Also on the summit, with the Baie Saint-Michel as its distant backdrop, stands a small chapel, Notre-Dame-de-l'Espérance.

This rustic chapel dates from the first half of the 19th Century. It's the remaining part of an older, larger chapel, dedicated to Saint Michael, that itself had been erected on the site of a pagan temple. The views beyond the chapel toward the bay are beautiful, although on the day we visited Mont Dol there was haze that left the Mont Saint-Michel barely visible on the horizon (and visible in this picture only as a slight smudge at the left edge).

The summit of Mont Dol afforded a much clearer view of the cathedral of the nearby village of Dol-de-Bretagne. The cathedral is a surprisingly large church for a town of this size, reflecting its medieval status as the seat of a bishop.

The village of Dol has a charming old center that provides an enjoyable stroll.

The stroll brings you to Dol's cathedral, named for Saint Samson, a monk from Cardiff who, in 548, founded a monastery in Dol. The present Gothic cathedral dates from the mid-13th Century, mostly. Lack of funds left the Gothic towers of the fairly simple facade unfinished.



The cathedral's interior is more elaborate. Even though it's a large building, it has a sense of lightness. The tracery in front of the upper-floor galleries helps to break up the massiveness, and the slender arches draw your eyes upward. If the exterior is sober, the interior can be rightfully termed flamboyant.

Le Musée de Bretagne

Le Musée de Bretagne, a wonderful museum in Rennes that reopened in new quarters in 2006, helps visitors learn about Breton peoples and cultures. I say peoples and cultures because the Breton peninsula has been home to several different groups, including pre-Celtic neolithic peoples, the Celtic Gauls, Romans and Romanized Gauls, and Britons, who, fleeing the Anglo-Saxon and Scots invaders starting in the late 4th Century, settled here and gave the area its name, Brittany, and a language, Breton. While the Britons/Bretons primarily settled in the west of Brittany, the east remained primarily Gaulish Gallo-Roman, with its own language, Gallo, a Romance language. To this day, the Breton/Gallo distinction is still reflected in the division of the Basse-Bretagne and Haute-Bretagne departments.

The museum is housed in an exciting building, called Les Champs Libres, that also contains a science museum, planatarium, and library. From the building's second floor (counting like Americans where the first floor is the ground floor), you can see the library's walls rising within the building.

The museum's permanent expositions are well-done, with lots of interactive and audio-visual exhibits. I can't really show you the interactive aspects here, but I thought I would at least show a few of the items on pre-Roman Brittany that caught my eye. These pottery pieces from the early neolithic age, about 6,700 years ago, were found in the nearby village of Saint-Etienne-en-Coglès. Note the decorative elements on pieces probably intended for storage.

The Gauls, before the arrival of the Roman Legion, maintained a culture with thriving trade. They minted coins, such as those seen here.

The Gauls' trade meant that they exported some materials and imported others. This marvelous bowl of the 1st or 2nd Century CE, with its designs in relief, came from Rome.

The museum also helps visitors understand the living cultural heritage of all these influences. One particularly interesting exhibit was a video showing speakers of Gaelic, Breton, Manx, and Gallo. The speaker of Breton discussed how she was raising her child to speak Breton.

Of Tides and Boats

The bay surrounding the Mont Saint-Michel has the highest tides of Europe. The tides move so fast that Victor Hugo wrote that the waters come in at the speed of a galloping horse. In fact, the entire north coast of Brittany is famous for its great range between low and high. This means that, as the waters recede, a lot of boats end up lying there on the floor of the harbor. In visiting the Emerald Coast, I saw a number of approaches to dealing with the problem of tides for boats.

One way to deal with low tide, and I would say the most prevalent, is simply to let your boat come to rest on its side.

If you're antsy about having your boat lie on its side on the harbor bottom, you can provide supports on each side of the boat that hold the boat upright as the tide goes out.

An even easier way to do this is to have a boat with twin keels that, with the rudder, form a tripod that keeps the boat vertical. I'd read about this, but I'd never actually seen this before. The twin keels aren't as effective for sailing as a single keel, but if you moored your boat in a big-tide area you might well choose this solution.

What else could you do? Instead of twin keels, how about twin hulls? This boat was docked at--and then below--the jetty at la Houle, Cancale's main harbor.

And for a truly radical approach to dealing with the tides, consider this truck rolling on the beach at La Houle.

Just drive into the water...

... and motor away into the bay!