Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey Cloister
— a courtyard suspended between the sea and the sky.
Not only on a wall.
“At the top of Mont-Saint-Michel, above the great vaulted halls of La Merveille, a small rectangular cloister opens onto the sky. Two staggered rows of slender columns ring a garden the Benedictines kept for walking and reading. The west gallery was meant to give onto a fourth wing of La Merveille that the abbey never built; instead the open arches look out over the bay. The cloister was finished around 1228, under Abbot Raoul des Îles. Gulls come through. Below it, the tide moves.
Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey Cloister, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Mont-Saint-Michel rises from a small granite tidal island in the bay where the Couesnon River meets the English Channel, on the historic border between Normandy and Brittany in northwestern France. The summit of the rock stands about 92 metres above the surrounding sand and water. The site has been monastic since 708, when Bishop Aubert of Avranches founded the first oratory; a Benedictine community took it over in 966 under Duke Richard I of Normandy. The cloister sits at the top of La Merveille, the Gothic complex built into the north flank of the rock between roughly 1211 and 1228, after Philip II Augustus funded the rebuilding of the abbey following a fire in 1204. UNESCO inscribed Mont-Saint-Michel and its bay on the World Heritage list in 1979.
The cloister forms a small rectangle ringed by a double row of slender columns set in staggered pairs, so the inner and outer rows do not align. As a visitor walks the gallery, the columns appear to slide past each other in a slow optical movement, an effect medieval masons favoured for small contemplative spaces. The columns are cut from pink-grey granite quarried in the Chausey Islands, the small archipelago about 40 kilometres offshore in the English Channel; the spandrels above them carry carved limestone foliage and small figures. The walls and arches were originally painted in rich colours that have long since faded back to bare stone. The whole gallery rests on three storeys of vaulted halls below, a thirteenth-century engineering decision that lets a quiet space float at the top of the rock.
The bay around Mont-Saint-Michel has one of the largest tidal ranges in continental Europe, with spring tides moving water as much as 14 metres between low and high. At low tide the bay drains for several kilometres, leaving sand flats that visitors can cross only in the company of a licensed guide. At high tide the water can return at speed, a phenomenon Victor Hugo described as moving at the pace of a galloping horse, an image local guides still repeat. The island became fully tidal again in 2014, when a slender pedestrian bridge replaced the nineteenth-century causeway that had silted up the channel around the rock. From the open western arches of the cloister, the bay extends out toward the Channel, weather permitting.