Inside Guédelon: The Artisans Building a 13th-Century Castle by Hand
For 30 years, a team of skilled artisans has been recreating a medieval castle in Central France—using only materials, tools, and techniques that were available in the 13th century.
Dear Friends,
For nearly three decades, a small group of artisans in rural France has been building a medieval castle—not as a historical reenactment, but as a serious experiment in recovering lost skills and knowledge. Working with period tools, local materials, and painstaking historical research, they've created a remarkable laboratory for understanding how craft traditions evolve, endure, and teach us things modern technology often obscures.
In this week's story, Anna Richards takes us back in time to the 13th century, and introduces the blacksmiths, carpenters, dyers, and other artisans bringing a castle (and centuries of forgotten know-how) back to life.
We hope you’ll enjoy reading, “Inside Guédelon: The Artisans Building a 13th-Century Castle by Hand,” written by Anna Richards.
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Inside Guédelon: The Artisans Building a 13th-Century Castle by Hand
Dressed in coarse, earth-toned tunics with rope belts, the artisans I’m watching toil under the sun in Bourgogne, France, look every bit like medieval laborers. There are quarrymen, carpenters, blacksmiths, even wheelwrights, and all of them leave me feeling as though I’ve fallen through time. At Guédelon Castle, it’s not 2026, but the year of our Lord 1257, and this castle-under-construction belongs to a (fictional) feudal lord in the County of Auxerre, part of the region known as Bourgogne (or Burgundy) today.
When construction began on Guédelon Castle, in 1997 (or 1228 in Guédelon time), locals thought the project was mad. Nearby, an excavation beneath the 17th-century Château of Saint-Fargeau uncovered the remains of a 13th-century castle, along with a sandstone quarry that was almost entirely hidden by the dense vegetation of Guédelon Forest. Further digging revealed water sources, iron ore, and clay, and the forest contained both hard- and softwood trees—so, all the raw materials needed to build a castle were still at hand. This gave Saint-Fargeau’s owner, Michel Guyot, and his friend Maryline Martin, a writer, an unusual idea: Could they build a castle from scratch, in the medieval style, using only the materials and methods that would have been available in the Middle Ages?
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