Who were they then?"
The answer, of course, is one man, one woman, and a single child.
S. Michael's Mount is a grand upshoot of granite from the sea. As a rock it is far finer than its corelative in Brittany, but the buildings crowning the Cornish mount are vastly inferior to the magnificent pile on Mont Saint Michel. Nevertheless, those that now form the residence of Lord S. Levan are by no means insignificant or unworthy of their position. The masses of granite crag, especially to the west, are singularly bold, and if some of the modern work be poor in design, it might have been much worse.
Within there is not much to be seen--a chapel of no great interest, and a dining-hall with good plaster-work representation of a hare hunt running round it. The drawing-room is new and spacious, and contains some really noble portraits.
At the foot of the rock is a draw-well, and a little way up is a tank called the Giant's Well. S. Michael's Mount was the habitation of the famous giant with whom Tom Thumb tried conclusions.
In or about 710, according to William of Worcester, an apparition of S. Michael the archangel was seen on the Tumba in Cornwall. This Tumba was also called Hore-rock in the Wood, "and there was formerly grove and field and tilled land between the Mount and the Scilly Isles, and there were a hundred and forty churches of parishes between the said Mount and Scilly that were submerged.... The district was enclosed by a most vast forest stretching for six miles in from the sea, affording a most suitable refuge for wild beasts, and in this were formerly found monks serving the Lord."
It is quite true that there is a submerged forest in Mount's Bay, and that the marshy snipe-ground near Marazion Road Station covers large timber, a portion of this great forest, but the submergence cannot have taken place in historic times. That there was, however, an encroachment of the sea in the middle of the sixth century, we learn from the Life of S. Paul, Bishop of Leon. He came to the bay to visit his sister, Wulvella, of Gulval, when she complained to him that she was losing much of her best land by the advance of the sea; and he, who had been brought up in the Wentloog levels, and taught by his master, S. Iltyd, how to keep up the dykes against the tides in the Severn, banked out the sea for her.
This was precisely the time when the district of Gwaelod was submerged in the Bay of Cardigan. The king of the district was Gwyddno Longshanks. It was the duty of the warden of the dykes to ride along the embankments, that had probably been thrown up by the Roman legionaries, and see that they were in order. Seithenyn was the Dyke-grave at the time.
One night Gwyddno and his court were keeping high revel, and the dyke-master was very drunk. There was a concurrence of a spring-tide and a strong westerly wind, and the waves overwhelmed the banks. The king escaped with difficulty before the inrolling stormy sea. A poem by the king, who thus lost his kingdom, has been preserved.
In Brittany about the same time there was a similar catastrophe.