Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandy · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

The story goes that it all began in 708, when the Archangel Michael appeared in a dream to Aubert, the bishop of nearby Avranches, and told him to build a church on the rocky tidal island then called Mont-Tombe. Aubert, sensibly enough, decided he had imagined it and did nothing. Michael came back a second time. Still nothing. On the third visit, out of patience, the archangel pressed a burning finger to the sleeping bishop's head and left a neat hole in his skull. That, apparently, settled it. The strangest part is that you can still go and look: the skull, hole and all, is kept as a relic in the Saint-Gervais basilica in Avranches to this day. Whatever you make of it, the abbey rose on the mount and became one of the great pilgrimage places of the medieval world, cut off twice a day by some of the fastest tides in Europe.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.