‘It’s back to the future’: the 13th-century castle built by hand in France

A quarter of a century after our first visit, the Guardian returns to Guédelon to find old-fashioned toil has built a “thoroughly modern” architectural laboratory

I

t was the summer of 1999 and, in a disused quarry in a forest in deepest Burgundy, a dozen or so incongruously attired figures were toiling away, hewing limestone blocks, chiselling oaken beams and hammering 6in nails.

The rough outline of what they were building was discernible, just: a perimeter wall a substantial 200 metres long and three metres thick; round towers, two large and two small, to mark the four corners; another pair flanking the main gateway.

Outside the clearing it was almost the 21st century. Inside, it was 1230 and, using only medieval tools and techniques and materials sourced locally or made on site, work had just begun on the castle of Guilbert Courtenay, a fictitious nobleman of relatively modest means.