St Michael's Mount

 Dear Gentle Readers

Today we drove to the east coast of Cornwall to visit this very unique attraction - St Michael's Mount. It is built on an island just off the coast and what is unique about it is, at low tide you can walk across an ancient causeway to get to the island.

This is the start of the causeway out to the island. We have timed our visit perfectly as low tide was at 9.30am today and we arrived at 10.30am. The causeway follows an old granite reef which has been used for centuries. The current paved causeway was laid around 1900. Severe Atlantic storms damaged it in 2014 and the modern granite paving was installed in 2016.

This picture shows you the construction details. This was a smoother portion, a lot of it has no mortar and the rocks are quite rough which made for difficult traversing. Victoria's feet suffered here.

Here we are approaching the island and you can see the castle in the distance.

In January this year, a severe storm hit the area and the island lost 100 trees. Here you can see them chopped up for disposal. As you can see, many of them were very old.

This is The Pilgrim's Steps, the start of the ascent to the castle at the top. It was a fun climb - not!

This is the view from the top of The Pilgrim's Steps, looking back to Marazion, the town on the coast.

It was a steep ascent after the steps, which prompted several stops for us to catch our breath.

Here we are near the top. The castle is over a thousand years old and has withstood many attempts to capture it because of its unique position.

There were a lot of people here today and the entrance to the castle shown here, was a choke-point where we had to wait several times to get into the castle proper.

This is the dining room and the table is not as old as the castle but it is constructed from two single long oak planks. The guide there (in blue standing by the window) said they have tried to work out how they got it in here as it would not have fitted through any of the doors, so he has supposed it came in through one of the windows.

Every castle has to have a library.

There was a beautiful draughts board in here. My father and I used to play this when I was a child but I could never beat him.

The castle had a good collection of weapons. Here is a fine group of swords,

a crossbow,

and a blunderbuss. Note the barrel widens at the end to make the shot spread out so you didn't need to be too accurate to hit your target.

This is the top of the castle with fantastic views back at the coast.

From up there I could see the tide coming in and water was beginning to flow over the causeway. There is no way I would attempt to walk back over that as the stones would be very slippery and treacherous. In fact the staff had closed the gate to the causeway by the time we got down there.

This was the queue for the ferry back to the mainland. It took us 30 minutes to get to a boat.

This is the causeway underwater.

And this is the causeway view from the mainland after the tide came in. There were a few daredevils out there who were attempting to walk it. Fools, the water was flowing over the causeway quite fast.

Tomorrow we are off to the town of Bath, home of Roman Baths with plumbing still working after 2000 years!