The ring of chisels against stone and axes sinking into timber resounds through northern Burgundy, France’s thick forests. It is not the landscape of a medieval romp but the location for Guédelon Castle, a 21st-century archaeological venture to learn the tricks of 13th-century building. Here, craftsmen and historians are working on a decades-long effort to construct a medieval castle from the ground up, with nothing but the tools, materials, and methods available to constructors nearly 800 years ago.
The project, launched in 1997, is an amazing blend of historical research and craftsmanship. In the forest outside the village of Treigny, Guédelon is the vision of French businessman Michel Guyot, who, having restored Château de Saint-Fargeau, was hit by the thought of building a castle in the way that middle-agers would have done. The site, an old sandstone quarry in the forest with a pond running alongside it, recreates the logistical limitations that medieval builders would have encountered.
Fundamentally, Guédelon is an experimental archeology project, a discipline that replicates ancient techniques to learn from the past. The castle architecture is in the style of Philip II of France, including the cylindrical towers, the arrow loops, and the chapel. Local materials are employed in the construction sandstone from the quarry, wood from the forest, and lime for mortar. Each piece of equipment, from the blacksmith’s hand-forged nails to the stonemason’s chisels, is forged in-house by traditional means.
“This is a place you experience with all your senses,” says Guédelon communications director Sarah Preston. As soon as we walk onto the site, you smell the woodsmoke. There’s something so evocative about these sights and sounds. And the fact that there’s no machinery allows visitors to experience an atmosphere that transports them several centuries back.
It is as instructional as it is to construct. Workers break from their work a few times each day to explain their methods to visitors, who come over 275,000 times annually. Children watch blacksmiths like Matisse Lacroix, who smelts metal up to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to form nails, like stonemasons demonstrating the way to trim blocks into impeccable geometric forms. This focus on pedagogy has encouraged a couple of child travelers to become pro heritage craftspeople, an important development as numbers of artisans with expertise in outdated methods dwindle.
Guédelon’s craftsmanship has already proven to be worth more than its forest clearing. After a devastating fire ravaged the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019, specialists borrowed inspiration from Guédelon. Dedicated “La Forêt” after the elaborate oak-beamed building, the roof posed a Herculean task to modern restoration, but as Guédelon site manager Florian Renucci described it, We showed that it can be done and we know how to do it. Carpenters who trained at Guédelon are now helping to rebuild Notre Dame using hand-hewn beams constructed with the same care and accuracy as their medieval forebears.
The effects of the project spill over into the wider arena of heritage preservation. France possesses in excess of 40,000 listed historical buildings, many of which need to be repaired on a frequent basis. But according to Jean-Claude Bellanger of the Compagnons du Devoir guild, the nation is understaffed when it comes to practitioners of skills such as stonecutting and carpentry. Guédelon provides a workshop for these much-needed skills, preserving medieval construction methods from oblivion.
Building itself is a school of cooperation and creativity. To hoist enormous stones, workers employ a treadmill crane—a wooden contraption looking like a huge hamster wheel. The two-man powered machine can lift a maximum of 1,000 pounds, indicating the advanced engineering solutions of the Middle Ages. “The charm of the skill is really to build by hand,” says Belgian stonemason Tendra Schrauwen at Guédelon. “There are no pneumatic hammers here. Everything is done by hand.”
Guédelon’s artisans also recreate everyday life on a medieval construction site. The castle site has a vegetable garden where Middle Age indigenous plants are grown. “We grow only medieval plants,” says gardener Antoine Quellen. No tomatoes or potatoes, as those came from South America much later. Even geese that help guard the site have a historical purpose, remembering their use as food as well as guard animals during medieval times.
The work is hardly half done, with another decade or two of work being estimated. Still, to the people who work on it, the journey itself is more precious than the end result. “It’s not about finishing the project,” declares carpenter Charles Teixido. “It’s about the things they learn and discover while building.” Teixido, a former chef who quit the culinary trade to become a carpenter, thinks that the methods employed at Guédelon are lessons for sustainable living. “The future is low tech,” he asserts, citing the use of traditional means to fight today’s problems such as climate change.
Guédelon is a castle, yes, but a workshop breathing with life, a half-way state of past and future. We are building to discover, according to Maryline Martin, the project co-creator, “We are building to discover.” Either as its contribution towards saving Notre Dame or as its safeguarding of heritage skills, Guédelon bears witness to the relevance of history and of skill to last.
For visitors, the experience is one of discovery. Behind stone walls and wooden beams is an admiration of deeper sort for medieval constructors’ cleverness and strength. And in a world increasingly ruled by technology, Guédelon stands as a tribute to the timeless might of human fingers and creativity.
