St Michael's Mount time in Britain in the 1930s, when he had proposed an alliance with Nazi Germany, General von Ribbentrop frequently visited Cornwall. In 1954, Francis Cecil St Aubyn, 3rd Baron St Levan gave most of St Michael's Mount to the National Trust, together with a large endowment fund. The St Aubyn family retained a 999-year lease to inhabit the castle and a licence to manage the public viewing of its historic rooms. This is managed in conjunction with the National Trust. The chapel of St Michael, a fifteenth-century building, has an embattled tower, one angle of which is a small turret,
St Michael's Mount land being inundated by the sea. One of the earliest references to the mount (originally named "Dynsol" or "Dinsul"), was in the mid 11th century when it was "Sanctus Michael beside the sea". In the 1600s John Milton used the Mount as the setting for the finale of what was once one of the most famous poems in English literature, his "Lycidas", which drew on the traditional sea-lore that had it that the archangel Michael sat in a great stone chair at the top of the Mount, seeing far over the sea and thus protecting England. In the mid 1850s