St Michael's Mount is situated on a small island off the coast at Marazion, Cornwall. It has being the home of the St Aubyn family for over 300 years and is one of Cornwall's most famous attractions. It's history goes back well beyond its current owners too shortly after the Conquest the Benedictine mother foundation of Mont Saint Michel in Normandy acquired St Michael's Mount by gift from Robert, Count of Mortain, who himself had been granted it only a few years before. In the first half of the following century the Abbot of Mont Saint Michel ordered a church to be constructed on the peak of the 300-foot rock in western England that so startlingly resembled his western French one. The original building fell down after an earth tremor some 150 years later and a replacement was put up the next century. The year before Agincourt the French proprietors were dispossessed and in HENRY VI's reign St Michael's Mount was made over to the Bridgettine nuns at Isleworth.

By the time of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s the number of religious at St Michael's had dwindled to a handful, much as is the case at Mont Saint Michel today. But the rock had for long been of more temporal than spiritual significance. Before the advent of accurate artillery pieces its sea-girt local position, to say nothing of its wider strategic importance as a site for the defence or invasion of England's southwesternmost arm, made it a highly desirable military prize. The capture of it in the late 15th century by the 13th Earl of Oxford is only one of a number of episodes in which it was hotly contended for.

After being bought from ELIZABETH I by Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, and passing through the hands of a royalist commander in the Civil War, one Francis Basset, it was acquired in 1657 by John St Aubyn, father of the 1st Baronet of the 1671 creation. The new owners used it as no more than a temporary summer retreat for the next two hundred years, though they 'improved' such features as the old Lady Chapel by judicious gothicising during the first half of the 18th century – an extremely early exercise in the style, given that Horace Walpole himself only embarked on Strawberry Hill some seven years later. Just as the last quarter of the 19th century began the 1st Baron Saint Levan (as he was to become 12 years later) called in a cousin of his, Piers St Aubyn, architect of the Temple Church off Fleet Street in London, and commissioned a thorough refurbishment, one which would give the family a proper dwelling there. Piers St Aubyn left the original ecclesiastical building at the very summit of the rock more or less alone but adroitly grafted onto its southeast flank a commodious mansion in light grey granite, carefully ensuring that the addition at no point interfered with the skyline view from afar of the old church. Internally the decoration is widely admired, notably (as well as the Lady Chapel already mentioned) the Chevy Chase Room, which was formerly the refectory when the monks lived there.