The hole in Bishop Aubert’s skull
In 708 the archangel Michael appeared to Aubert, bishop of Avranches, with orders to build a sanctuary on the rock in the bay. Twice Aubert set it aside as a dream. At the third appearance the angel pressed his finger through the bishop’s skull. Then the building began.
1 Asking three times
The bay between Normandy and Brittany is one of the strangest landscapes in Europe. The tide runs over a flat of tens of kilometres, the water comes and goes at a speed that has caught people out, and in the middle of that flat stands a granite rock that is an island at high water and no island at low.
On that rock at the start of the eighth century there was not much. There was a chapel, there were a few hermits, and otherwise wind.
In 708 Aubert, bishop of nearby Avranches, dreamed that the archangel Michael stood by him and charged him to build a church on the rock after the model of Monte Gargano in Apulia. Aubert woke and did what sensible people do with dreams: nothing. A second appearance followed. He hesitated again, for to build a church on a rock unreachable twice a day is no small matter, and he did not know whether he was hearing his own head or heaven.
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