Advertisement From Cudden Point headland, a couple of miles along the Cornish coast, St Michael’s Mount looks like a truly forbidding fortress. But from the seafront of the small town of Marazion opposite, it somehow softens into pure fairytale. Rapunzel might have let down her tresses from one of the turrets. The tidal island is uncannily similar to its twin in Normandy, Mont-Saint-Michel, from where Benedictine monks first arrived in 1044. It has been secular since the English Civil War, when it was held by Royalists as one of their last strongholds against Roundhead forces. Since then it has been a rather unusual family home.