Guédelon Castle

Michel Guyot bought the ruins of the Château de Saint-Fargeau in 1979 and restored them on profits raised at the site itself. The idea of building a castle from nothing came to him in 1994, after the historical pageant staged there to fund the work proved a success, and it hardened in late 1995 when a survey by his own staff found medieval foundations beneath the brick ruins and produced a conjectural plan of the castle that had stood there. Guyot assembled a scientific committee — among them the castellologist Christian Corvisier and Nicolas Faucherre, both of whom had worked at Saint-Fargeau — brought in Maryline Martin to run the site, and spent five months of 1997 raising money from the European Union, the Burgundy region, the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, Électricité de France and a Swiss private donor. The ground chosen, thirteen kilometres from Saint-Fargeau, was picked the way a medieval builder would have picked it, hauling being slow and costly: a disused ferruginous sandstone quarry on a slight rise, with forest for firewood, clay, sand and water to hand. The first stone was laid on 20 June 1997, and the work was expected to take twenty-five years.

The plans were drawn in 1997 by Jacques Moulin, chief architect of historic monuments, to the Philippian model of the late twelfth to early fourteenth centuries: six round towers, four at the angles and two forming the entrance châtelet, joined by blind curtain walls carrying a wall-walk around a perimeter of 150 metres, with the lord's hall inside. Finished, the curtains are to stand nine metres high and two and a half metres thick behind dry ditches, the flanking towers fifteen metres, the great tower 28.5 metres. To keep the scale honest the team invented an owner: Guilbert Courtenay, a minor knight of Puisaye born in 1199, vassal of Jean de Toucy and married to one of his nieces, the lands that came with the match paying for the work; the king granted him licence to bastir chatel, and the site's fictional start date is 1228. A lord of that rank explains what Guédelon has and has not — a keep, a chapel, a lord's chamber and a watermill, but no drawbridge, no moat, no prison and no oubliettes.

Almost all the stone comes out of the quarry at the foot of the walls — ferruginous sandstone, with limestone kept for the carved work — and thirty thousand tonnes of sandstone are needed in all. The quarrymen judge a block by the sound their tools make on it — the hardest goes to the tower bases, the middling to the cutters, the friable and sandy into the towers' internal packing — then cut a line of sockets twenty-five centimetres apart, drive wedges into them and split the block out. The cutters set out full-size geometrical drawings on a plank floor, work templates from them, and sign each finished stone with its banker and setting marks; a plain facing block takes a third of a day, a carved piece days or weeks. Masons bed the stone in mortar of air lime, earth and sand. Measurements are taken with a graduated rod, a thirteen-knot rope, compass and square, and the œuvriers work between thirty-eight and forty-eight hours a week from March to November, with radios, tins and wristwatches barred from the site.

Clearing began in 1997 with ten hectares of forest cut back and the ground levelled for foundations. Visitors were let in on 1 May 1998, when the walls were barely a metre up; by 2001 the built perimeter stood at three metres, the cistern was finished and the well capped. The fixed bridge was completed in August 2002 out of fifty-seven oak trunks and 670 hand-forged nails. The lord's hall, 13.8 metres long, went up in 2003, and with it the first two treadwheel cranes — demountable, so that they could be re-erected wherever they were wanted, and built on a single drum in which one man alone could raise 150 kilogrammes more than four metres.

The great tower's ground floor was fitted out over the following two years with a paved floor, a door, a murder-hole and arrowslits, and the tilery was completed in 2006. The hall received its roof frame in 2010, the year the great tower reached fifteen metres; in 2011 the roof was closed with 28,000 tiles and a third crane went up on the curtain wall, this one pivoting through almost 180 degrees on a double drum, two men lifting four to five hundred kilogrammes of mortar, or six hundred of stone, at a hoist. In the spring of 2014 a watermill was built beside the castle after two years' work with France's national rescue-archaeology institute, its 2.4-metre wheel turning a millstone of about a quarter of a tonne; it was modelled on two mills excavated at Thervay in the Jura ahead of the Rhine–Rhône high-speed line, one dated between the eighth and tenth centuries, the other between the eleventh and twelfth.

The point was never the finished building. Guédelon was set up to let experimental archaeology follow a construction site whole and over decades, rather than test isolated objects or operations, and the initial design deliberately left both the sequence of works and much of the massing unresolved, so that each problem would be met as a medieval builder met it — improvisation, second thoughts and all. A standing scientific council of medievalists and buildings archaeologists works alongside the annual programme, and side experiments in forging, terracotta and dyeing have grown out of it. By 2014 the site was drawing around 300,000 visitors a year on revenue of some three million euros, and it now ranks third among the monuments of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté after the Hospices de Beaune and the citadel of Besançon. The techniques recovered there were put to use in the reconstruction of Notre-Dame de Paris after the fire of 2019.