Work began in 1999 in a disused quarry in Burgundy with workers in medieval dress using medieval tools to build a castle for the fictional nobleman Guilbert Courtenay. Builders hewed limestone, chiselled oak, and hammered nails to create a 200-metre perimeter wall three metres thick with round towers at corners and gate flanks. By summer 2025 the structure is recognisably an early 13th-century French castle with ramparts, turrets, a vaulted great hall, chambers, chapel, kitchens and a working flour mill in the woods. The site functions as a living archaeological, architectural, cultural, historical and scientific laboratory valued by specialists.
It 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. Back then, the walls were half a metre high and no one had the faintest idea when or, more to the point, whether Chateau de Guedelon would ever be finished.
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