Hoof Against Soil, Chisel Against Stone

First Published in Draft Horse Journal, December, 2022

The clank of trace chains and the slow creak of the forecart’s wheels breaks the morning’s silence as they turn around and around, rolling over dew-covered grass. Up front, a pair of Belgian mules – Loretta on my left and Annabelle on my right – doing what draft animals have done for centuries and doing it well, I might add.

My mules know the tasks at hand and, better yet, they know me. It’s a quiet communication when we farm together. It may not be the fastest or most modern way to get things done, but treading lightly on the soil, returning what is taken to complete the natural cycle, and working in harmony with other living, thinking, breathing creatures is the sanest solution I know to feeding others and ourselves.
 
Some call it a lost art. But it really isn’t that. Not yet anyways. Perhaps just temporarily misplaced.
 
4,300 miles away, deep within the thick forests of Burgundy in central France, it is 1253. King Louis IX is on the throne, King Henry III is in England, and the fictional Guilbert Courtenay, aka Guilbert de Guédelon, awaits his new abode currently under construction by a vast team of artisans. Stone masons, woodworkers, blacksmiths, and laborers, all convened for one purpose; to build a simple chateau for a low-ranking aristocrat and knight who has been gifted rights to a small bit of land by Blanche of Castile, regent to her son the king and the woman who was the real powerholder during that brief moment in the history of France.
 
A short walk beyond the trees surrounding the clearing and you’ll find yourself back in 2022, with all its chaos and devout worshipping of the newest technological innovations. Two hours away lies Paris, the City of Light. But here, in the shadow of a medieval-styled flour mill recently built based on a newly discovered archaeological find nearby, it is most certainly the Middle Ages by all appearance.
 
It is called the Guédelon project, an exercise in “experimental archaeology” started in 1997 by Michel Guyot and Maryline Martin, to design and build a castle as close to period-correct specifications using only materials close at hand and limiting themselves and their team of artisans to the tools and methods available to builders of that era. It would be easy to dismiss this antiquated stone chateau being constructed in our modern era as a Disneyesque trip of cosplay, akin to a sort of Gallic renaissance faire to be visited as a weekend curiosity and just as quickly forgotten.
 
But the work of Guédelon means more. Not just by the fact they assembled together a small handful of craftspeople who still possessed the nearly forgotten skills and knowledge of the old methods; from cutting, squaring, and hand-hewing beams from felled trees, to carving stone blocks into shapes that interlock with near perfection. But by creating a trade school of sorts, to pass on the ways of these Middle Ages building arts to others, ensures that these all but lost fabrication techniques that had somehow managed to survive for scores of generations will live on for at least one or two more.
 
It was April 15, 2019, a sunny Monday afternoon, when I came inside from finishing up some barn chores that the first images appeared on my computer screen. The Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo tweeted, “Un terrible incendie est en cours à la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris.” Notre-Dame Cathedral was burning.
 
To the world, and especially to the people of France, Notre-Dame is more than just an old Catholic church. It is Point Zéro, the geographic marker from which all distances are measured in that country. By the time the fire was finally extinguished, two-thirds of the roof was gone and the spire had collapsed into the nave.
 
Experts were quick to declare that no one could rebuild it as it was before the flames destroyed the complex wooden roof structure, known as La Forêt (the forest.) The framed roof that once stood above the nave and high altar was extremely sophisticated even by modern standards, using techniques that were leap-years ahead for the 12th and 13th centuries, the 182-year time period during which the cathedral was built.
 
Famous architects dreamed up replacement schemes for the lost roof and spire. Monstrosities constructed out of steel and glass along with other materials of mass-production that spoke more about an architect’s ego and our own era’s veneration of the fastest and the cheapest than about the grandeur and timelessness that is a Gothic cathedral. Many deemed anything outside of modern construction techniques in this day and age as quite simply “impossible.”
 
Except Guédelon has been building with, and teaching those “impossible” techniques and all-but-lost skills for a quarter of a century.
 
Guédelon’s site manager has already been asked to oversee training the artisans who will work on Notre-Dame Cathedral and the chateau’s blacksmiths have been retained to forge the axes that will cut the wood for the renewed structure. Will it be fully restored by 2024, as President Macron had promised? I hope not. Quality and speed do not go hand in hand.
 
Hoof against soil, chisel against stone, harness against skin, iron against wood. Nostalgic? Archaic? Not at all. Essential is perhaps a better word.