St Michael ' s Mount St Michael ' s Mount ( , meaning " grey rock in the woods " , also known colloquially by locals as simply " the Mount " ) is a tidal island off the Mount ' s Bay coast of Cornwall , England , United Kingdom . It is a civil parish and is united with the town of Marazion by a man - made causeway of granite setts , passable between mid - tide and low water . The island has a mix of slate and granite ( see " Geology " below ) . 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 ( 10 km ) 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 1099 , " 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 ( which shares the same tidal island characteristics and the same conical shape ) , when it was given to the Benedictine s , religious order of Mont Saint - Michel , by Edward the Confessor in the 11th century . St Michael ' s Mount is one of 43 ( unbridged ) tidal islands which can be walked to from mainland Britain . History . 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 is claimed that St . Michael , the Archangel appeared to local fishermen on the Mount in the fifth century AD , which according to author Richard Freeman Johnson is perhaps a nationalistic twist to a myth . 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 and in 1275 an earthquake destroyed the original priory church , which was rebuilt in the late 14th century . It is still in use today . The priory was seized by the Crown , when Henry V went to and it became part of the endowment for the Brigittine Abbey of Syon at Twickenham in 1424 . Thus ended the connection with Mont St Michel . 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 I , 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 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 had been sealed off to become 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 . The pier was extended in 1821 and the population peaked in the same year , when the island had 221 people . 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 . The Mount was fortified during the Second World War during the invasion crisis of 1940 – 41 . Three pillboxes can be seen to this day . Sixty - five years after the Second World War , it was suggested based on interviews with contemporaries that the former Nazi foreign minister and one time ambassador to Britain , Joachim von Ribbentrop , had wanted to live on the Mount after the planned German conquest . Archived documents revealed that during his time in Britain in the 1930s , in which he had initially proposed an alliance with Nazi Germany , Ribbentrop frequently visited Cornwall . In 1954 , the 3rd Baron St Levan gave most of St Michael ' s Mount to the National Trust , together with a large endowment fund . The St Aubyn family retained a 999 - year lease to inhabit the castle and a licence to manage the public viewing of its historic rooms . This is managed in conjunction with the National Trust . Local government . Until recent times both the Mount and the town of Marazion formed part of the parish of St Hilary . 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 . 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 . 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 . 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 island ' s own 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 mudstone s or pelite s . The granite is itself mineralised with a well - developed sheeted greisen vein system . Due to its geology the southern coast of the island was designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1995 . 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 pegmatite s . 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 feldspar s 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 . In popular culture . " Mt Saint Michel Mix + Saint Michaels Mount " is the title of an experimental electronic track by musician Aphex Twin , who grew up in Cornwall . In Michael Moorcock ' s series of Fantasy novels about Prince Corum , a fictionalised version of St Michael ' s Mount appears as Moidel ' s Mount . It was prominently featured in the 1979 film " Dracula " as the exterior of " Castle Dracula " . It appeared in the 1983 James Bond film " Never Say Never Again " , as two guided missiles armed with nuclear warheads fly over the English countryside and out to sea , passing directly over St Michael ' s Mount . In the 2003 film " Johnny English " it was used as the exterior of the character Pascal Sauvage ' s French chateau . It was one of the locations used on BBC One " Balloon " Idents . In the Spring of 2012 , it was a filming location of the fantasy adventure movie " Mariah Mundi and the Midas Box " , which is scheduled for release in 2013 .