Visiting a castle can be an anaemic experience. You traipse round cold and unfurnished rooms, read a few skimpy leaflets and listen to the unconvincing audio-guide, all while trying to persuade the children that they really are interested in it all. The stones, too often for too many of us, do not speak.
Far better, then, to visit the most vital, lively and working castle you will ever see – where the open fires are not sealed off by heritage experts for safety but blazing and providing welcome heat, where the walls are still being decorated and the chapel festooned with linen hangings; where you don’t need to perform mental somersaults to imagine the miracles of its construction but can see it happening in front of you, as woodcutters and carpenters, smiths and masons fell oaks, split logs, raise roof trusses, forge nails, slake lime and layer recently cut sandstone onto the rising walls.
Two hours south of Paris, east of Orleans and deep, deep in the Burgundian woods, a medieval castle is being constructed as if it was still the 13th century.
At the Château of Guédelon, led by master-mason Florian Renucci, advised by academic medievalists and funded by 300,000 awed spectators who come every year to stare and wonder, a growing band of French craftsmen have spent the last 25 years re-leaning how medieval men and women built stone castles with no electricity, no computers, no power tools and no mechanical machinery, just stone from a nearby sandstone quarry, wood from the forests and clay from the soils around.
It is one of the most inspiringly insane collective efforts taking place anywhere in the world right now. But if you want to see it, time is running out.
Local land owner, Michel Guyot, first had the idea when he discovered that, like the château in the classic French film Les Visiteurs, his home, the Château de Saint-Fargeau, had an unseen medieval core within its 17th-century brick walls.
Reconstructing the original would, he thought, be “an amazing project” and he could not get the idea out of his head. Former businesswoman Maryline Martin then decided that it would be rendered viable by buying land cheaply and funding it with grants and paying tourists.
For years they researched medieval castle-building and searched for land with ready access to stone and wood. A remote abandoned sandstone quarry in the Guédelon forest fitted the bill, as it was fit neither for farming nor development. They purchased nearly 30 acres nearby for 6,500 Francs in 1996.
Ever since, during daylight hours every year from March to November, a team of craftsmen have been forging tools, cutting wood, hewing and shaping stone. Most, as they explain to visitors, have had to “relearn” how to create a building: the master mason sets out designs on the tracing floor; plans and progress are discussed in the weekly site meeting and stones are cut to the shape of wooden moulds.
French metres have been abandoned for pre-metric measures which, as a mason explains to me, can be estimated most accurately from the human body: inches and palms, hands, feet and cubits.
Hardly surprisingly, Guédelon has become incredibly important to our understanding of medieval construction techniques. For the first time in half a millennium scholars can talk to masons who have actually built a medieval hall with nothing but blacksmith-forged tools. But Guédelon has done more than this.
Odd though it may seem, such a conservatively created building is also profoundly modern and deeply “green”. Its carbon footprint is almost zero; it is powered by nothing more than the humans who are building it, two horses, one donkey, charcoal, a wood kiln and a nearby stream. Few buildings as substantial as this one can say the same.
The earth yields sandstone for the walls, sand for the mortar, clay for the roof and floor tiles and ochres of various hues to paint the hall, chapel and chambers. The surrounding forest of Guédelon grows oaks for the roof timbers, battens and oak shakes (or wooden tiles) and hornbeam and birch to fuel the furnaces and fire the kilns. Crops are grown to supplement the workers’ lunches.
Indeed, the castle’s most costly carbon imposition is not its own construction but the petrol of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who drive to see it each year. My family were mesmerised by the craftsmen shaping the wood, forming the roof tiles, making rope; moved by the ancient smell of wood smoke wafting through a damp forest.
The clay is formed into tiles a few yards from where it is scooped up. The paint maker explained to us that over the years she had learnt which bits of the forest floor can be used to create paint of different hues.
You should go too. Few English tourists come here. It is, after all, remote. But hurry. They have been at it since 1998 (which they imagined to be 1229 in the castle’s imaginary chronology) and they are due to finish it this year, at which point some of the extraordinary dynamism of the site will depart along with the tile-makers and craftsmen. So visit an astonishing medieval castle in the making while you still can; they won’t be making another one in your lifetime.
How to do it
Guédelon Castle (guedelon.fr/en) is in Yonne, Burgundy, on the main road 955 between Saint-Sauveur-En-Puisaye and Saint-Amand-En-Puisaye. It is open until November 5 this year, admission €14/£12.
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