I'm sitting in our hotel room... where to see Mont St-Michel, we need to step into a handkerchief sized balcony, lean out precariously... and catch a mere glimpse. But what is even more inspiring than Mont St-Michel is the water rushing past our doorstep... the incoming tide. The channel carrying the water is racing like a river in flood. Since the tide turned some 30 minutes ago, water has risen some 4 metres. We are some 2 klms from the sea... so we should be 4 or 5 metres above sea level. In peak season, this region has 15 metre tides. As you can see, I'm trying to calculate if we are safe from the incoming tide... at the rate is rising now, I'm starting to have my doubts!
Today, the Mont St-Michel region is most famous for its Abbey on the rock... in the future it could be famous for the electricity power generated from its fantastic tides.
Its been pouring rain all day... the wettest day of our holiday. We hurried to the Mont... knowing it would provide good entertainment out of the rain. We were not disappointed. This building on Mont St-Michel has interest from a number of perspectives... but the one most interesting for me was to view it as evidence of what stonemasons could do without any new fangled building materials like bricks and steel... when they ruled the construction industry.
The building is on a tidal island... connected to the mainland by a causeway. Its claim to fame is that it has not been taken by enemy forces. In the 100 years war against England, Mont St-Michel withstood a thirty year siege. For the same reasons that it is difficult to invade... it is also difficult to build on the site. Every step of the building took forever... large blocks of stone had to be shipped-in from offshore islands... the big blocks had to be hauled up the cliff face... to build designs that set new standards of difficulty for the day.
The builders/engineers amongst you will appreciate the difficulty. We saw 3 rooms built one on top of the other... all facing, on one side, the 50 meter cliff. All of the three rooms had no internal walls supporting the ceiling... all were 50 metres long, by 20 meters wide. The roof of each room was supported by a dozen columns. To my way of thinking... to build one such room out of stone blocks would take some skill... to stack three... one on top of the other... requires genius. They had to add extra windows to the top floor to reduce weight... use some wooden supports to reduce weight... while attaining lines of design that pleased the kings and bishops of the day.
I've just looked out the window again... the race of water down the channel has slowed... perhaps we are safe from the high tide!
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