Guedelon Castle

Guedelon

We have been in France for three days and the main reason we came to France was to see Guedelon castle.  Guedelon castle is a 25 year project to see how castles were built in the middle ages.

The first thing we saw was the rope making. First they get 4 strands of string and loop them over four hooks. They may use more string if they are making thick rope.

They turn the handle which spins all the strings in the same direction until they are tightly wound, then they add a wooden cross that separates the 4 strings and turn the string the other way.  The separater moves along the strings as they get wound together in to a thicker rope. When it gets to the end it falls into a basket that the basket makers would have made.

The basket makers made some really cool baskets. Holly thought they were really cool spent a lot of time watching them. They were made from will. First you make the  base. This is done by getting 8 strips of willow putting  them into 2 groups of 4. Then you slit a hole through 4 of the willow sticks  and put the other 4 through the slit and then start to weave other sticks of willow around them.

Next we saw the black smith but we don’t know what he was making. He only spoke French so we couldn’t ask him, but Aidan thinks they were making a door hinge. The carpenter and the black smith have to put the door on.

Sometimes they need two people to hit the metal.  One has a big hammer, the other has a small hammer, the person  that has the small hammer hits softly and the person with the big hammer hits harder than the one with the small one.

We also saw the stone masons. The stone masons shape the stone to fit in the wall of the castle.They have to shape the rock with a hammer and a chisel once that is done they send it to the castle on a hand cart.  When they are ready to put it in the castle wall it has to be listed up with a lifting wheel.  Two men would put it on a block of wood then one of the men got into the wheel and started walking.  The wheel is attached by a rope to a pulley on the castle wall and the rock is slowly lifted up until it reaches the top.  There is a trap door in the scaffolding that can be opened so the stones can go in and they are able to be put in as  part of the wall.

The stones came from the quarry next to the castle, The quarrymen are hard at work all day cutting rocks for the stone masons to shape for the castle wall.

There were also tile makers to make the tiles for each room in the castle and for the roof of the towers and other buildings. To make the tiles they get some clay which they dig out of the ground.  One person kneads the clay, two other people put the kneaded clay in moulds flatting it with a mallet. Then they take it out and put out side to dry. Sometimes they make patterns in the tiles, or colour them with different types of powders.

Once they are dry they put them in the tile kiln to fire them.  This is a big job as they have to light a fire under the kiln and it takes a long time to get hot enough.  Once the tile are done they get them out of the kiln and tap two together to see if they had been fired well enough we did not get to see the tiles being fired but we saw it happen on a tv show called Secrets of the Castle.

While we were at the castle we saw a man try to split wood with wooden wedges. The man doing it was not that good though because he was just starting at the castle. It is quicker to split a log using wedges than it is to saw it in half.

We also saw the lime pit where they get the lime to make the lime mortar to use to keep the walls together.

The castle also had some pigs they were very fat but small one was sleeping in the mud that was in their pen.  The were some men making the pig sty with the lime mortar.

Going to the castle was really interesting because you could see how castles used to be build before they had machines.   We have seen lots of castles on our trip, but most of them are falling down. This is the only castle in the world that is being built this way so it was like going back in a time machine to see how things really worked 800 years ago.  It was really cool.  We would like to go back again when the castle is nearly finished. 

This is a video of some of the things we saw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bLVhDdellA