The podcast by project managers for project managers. For the past 25 years, the Guédelon Castle project has been a mesmerizing journey into the past, building a medieval castle in the forest near Paris using authentic 13th-century methods. Sarah Preston details this project where a dedicated team of artisans and history enthusiasts have revived medieval construction practices, with meticulous attention to detail.
Table of Contents
02:16 … The Inspiration for the Guedelon Project
04:19 … The Onsite Experience
06:08 … Dressing for the Project
08:18 … Adhering to Historical Architectural Principles
11:02 … Tool-Making Process
12:49 … Funding the Guedelon Project
16:07 … Safety Plans
17:39 … Planning Permission Process
18:00 … Where to Build the Castle?
20:00 … Collaborating with Advisory Committees
21:33 … Ren Love’s Projects of the Past
23:51 … 13th Century Team Communication
28:37 … Staff Training
30:23 … Unique Project Challenges
31:11 … Guedelon Project Lessons Learned
35:56 … Modelling a Vault Build
38:51 … Measuring Success
41:08 … Leadership Lessons
42:46 … Guedelon Project Completion
44:01 … Find out More
45:09 … Closing
SARAH PRESTON: …the castle is measured both in the height of the walls and the strength of the castle itself, but also in men and women who have gained this knowledge, who are sharing that knowledge and inspiring future generations.
WENDY GROUNDS: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers. I’m Wendy Grounds, and here in the studio with me is Bill Yates. We are so excited about today’s project…
BILL YATES: Yes.
WENDY GROUNDS: …that I just want to jump straight into that. So about a year or two ago I watched a program, and it was a BBC series on a castle. It is called the Guédelon Castle, and it’s a remarkable project that’s been, gosh, I think for about 25 years they’ve been building this castle. It’s nestled in the forest near Paris, and it’s a testament to the dedication of a team of artisans and history enthusiasts. And they are resurrecting authentic medieval building techniques.
This is an ambitious experimental archaeology project that has captivated historians and builders alike as they are meticulously recreating medieval construction practices, and they’re not using any modern amenities like electricity and power tools. They are just building a castle using bricks and using…
BILL YATES: And they’re putting the bricks together, and they’re mixing the paint.
WENDY GROUNDS: Right.
BILL YATES: It’s just mind-blowing.
WENDY GROUNDS: It’s all from scratch. The person we’re talking to is Sarah Preston. She is originally from the southwest of England, and she’s worked at Guédelon since 2006. She’s a guide, a photographer, a translator, a press officer, and she’s also worked as associate producer for numerous documentaries about Guédelon.
So, when we reached out to them, they wanted to talk with us. They were excited to share their project. But they needed someone who spoke English. Or we did, because we don’t speak French. So, we are very excited to be talking to Sarah.
BILL YATES: You know, Wendy, one of the interesting things to me with this project, there are so many aspects to it. But the lessons that they’ve learned with Guédelon are now being applied to the reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, following the fire that was so devastating to that beautiful cathedral back in 2019. My wife and I were fortunate enough to see Notre Dame before it burned. And just the, you know, the heavy heart when I saw the devastation of that. So, it’s especially neat tribute that this project is helping the reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, it’s pretty incredible, and I’m excited to get into it. So do join us, folks, as we celebrate this remarkable project.
Sarah, welcome to Manage This. Thank you so much for joining us today.
SARAH PRESTON: Thank you for having me.
The Inspiration for the Guedelon Project
WENDY GROUNDS: We are thrilled to be able to talk with you, so we thank you so much for your time. But to begin with, can you take us back into how this Guédelon project began? What was the inspiration to build a castle like this?
SARAH PRESTON: Well, the idea for building a castle from scratch was born at Saint-Fargeau castle, which is a castle just a few miles down the road from here. You can visit it today. It’s an amazing red brick Renaissance castle. But an archaeological study carried out in the ‘90s revealed that hidden inside those thick brick walls were still the remains of a stone medieval fortress.
So, for the owner, Michel Guyot, this was a really exciting revelation, and for him was the starting point of the idea of wanting to build a castle from scratch in order to understand how the castle had been in the Middle Ages, and how it had developed over time. So, this kind of madcap idea initially of building a castle, of recreating a medieval construction site, was really seized upon by Maryline Martin, who is still the president of the company here.
And for her this was an opportunity to not just launch an archaeological experiment on a massive scale, this was also a collective venture. This was an opportunity to create jobs, to boost the local economy, to really offer long-term training for future employees. So Guédelon has lots of different branches to it. It is experimental archaeology; but it is, as I say, very much a collective venture.
The Onsite Experience
When you come onsite, there are two things that you experience. You experience, obviously, the sight of a castle, which looks like a castle would have looked in the 13th Century, but which also is a reflection of the landscape that it’s in. So, we do sometimes have visitors who find it really hard to believe that everything that they are looking at is a new build because we have literally taken the stone from the ground, the clay from the forest, the trees from the surrounding area, and we have transformed them into architecture, which is what a heritage building is. It’s the transformation of the landscape into architecture using traditional skills. So, you see the castle. You see the beauty of the forest that it’s standing in.
But the other experience that you have is an audio experience. You leave behind the sounds of a modern construction site. You leave behind the sounds of the 21st Century, and you hear the chisels on stone, the hammer on the anvil, the horse and cart. And that I think is as much part of the experience as what you see.
BILL YATES: Mmm, that really struck me when I was watching some of the videos of the build, like you pointed out, the sounds. There are not these massive cranes or dirt-moving equipment or the things that we’re so accustomed to seeing on a jobsite. Instead, you have these crafted skills men, men and women, who are by hand using these primitive tools and just, they’re chopping wood, they’re trying to take a large stone and make it small and shape it so that it can be used in the wall or in the construction. And it is a very different sound.
Dressing for the Project
The other thing that I want you to address is not only is there no electricity being used, no modern-day tools, you’re being true to the 13th Century. But what I’ve seen from the images is everyone’s even wearing the proper clothes. So, they’re not wearing AC/DC rock concert T-shirts or hats, you know, they’re even dressed appropriately.
SARAH PRESTON: Yeah, no high vis jackets. Yeah, we decided very early on that in terms of the costumes we were going to wear, we’d keep it very simple. So, we’re not trying to totally recreate 13th-century costumes in that comfort and safety comes first. Because obviously the members of staff working onsite are members, they are members of staff, they’re paid, and they have to be comfortable and safe. So, the costumes that we wear are a kind of a way of marking us out from the visitors, obviously; but it’s our uniform.
And I’ve really noticed that, when people put them on, there is a change. There’s a change when we’re all working as a team, wearing our costumes. There’s a kind of magic that happens when we’re all working together in that way, that ends the minute the season ends. And we’ve tried filming, for example, we thought, oh, it’d be much easier to film at the end of the season when the visitors have gone. And that isn’t so because there’s something about the site being open, we’re all in costumes working, and the visitors are there.
There’s something quite theatrical about it, I guess, about this creation of a lost world, even though I’m fully aware that we are not wearing authentic 13th-century garb. There are anachronisms onsite, and a lot of them are linked to our costumes. Obviously, we’re there to respect modern health and safety laws. So, we have steel toe cap shoes. There are hard hats. They’re hidden by straw or by linen, but they are hidden. We have masks when we’re working in sandstone, so this is to prevent us breathing in the fine dust. The ropes which we use on the lifting machinery are modern. They have known breaking strains. So, there are compromises that we make in the name of health and safety, and they’re compromises which we are more than happy to meet.
Adhering to Historical Architectural Principles
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah. Your model is based on historical and architectural principles. So how do you ensure that that, that the construction adheres to exactly what is the historical architectural principles?
SARAH PRESTON: Well, obviously when we set about building a medieval castle, it was really important that we first of all narrowed down the timeframe that we were interested in, as the Middle Ages represents a thousand years of history. So, if you look at the wooden fortresses which are being built in the year 500 and compare them with the stone palaces of 1500, you can see that huge development takes place. So, when we started, we took as being the period of interest the 13th Century, the 1200s. There’s a really rich, exciting time in terms of castle construction.
The castle that we’re building is not a castle which ever really existed. It’s a fake castle, but it’s a castle which respects the standard features that you would find in the type of castle being built at that time in history. So, it has a quadrangular courtyard. It has cylindrical towers. It has one tower higher than the others, the great tower. And it has ranges of buildings against the curtain wall. All the features that you see within the castle, every fireplace, every window, every doorway has a feature in one of the castles which we use as a reference. So, we have over 50 castles that we regularly consult. We visit them. We film. And we sketch. We take photographs. And we bring those models back and then select which ones we’re going to incorporate. But they have to exist in a castle from that time period.
Initially, the very first plans were drawn up by Jacques Moulin, who – he’s retired now, but he was a head architect for Monuments Historiques, which is the body which looks after historic buildings here in France. So, he drew up the plans which allowed us to get planning permission, but there never was and still isn’t a blueprint of the finished castle. So, in that sense we’re again working like medieval builders. I don’t know, nobody knows exactly what the finished castle will be like as of today because, year by year or season by season, we draw up the plans for the season through the research that we do alongside the archaeologists.
And some of the moments when I think that we’re the closest to the experience of a 13th-century builder is when we’re onsite, the master mason is looking at the ground, he’s got his ruler in his hand, and he’s saying, okay, if we put the door here, then the stairs will fit – oh, no, that’s not going to work. Let’s change it. And things are done in situ onsite rather than on a piece of paper. We can still make mistakes, but there’s still something very human about that way of working.
Tool-Making Process
BILL YATES: You know, one of the aspects that is fascinating to me is you and the team, the artisans figured out, okay, these were the types of tools that were available to those who were building, that were doing construction in the 13th Century. We’re not going to go purchase those. We’re going to build those tools ourselves. We’ll build the tools and then use those tools to build the castle. That’s just fascinating. So, there was some history there that was available to guide you in that. But then it got down to iron ore and blacksmiths and creating these tools. Can you speak to that a bit?
SARAH PRESTON: Of course, yeah. Initially, one of the really important pieces of evidence that we relied on was the iconography. So stained glass windows, illuminated manuscripts. And we’ve relied really heavily on those documents as a source of information for the tools that we could expect to have available. Now, initially, if for example, a tool hasn’t changed form, which many of them haven’t over hundreds of years, you might still find modern trowels, certainly early on in the process, when we hadn’t had time to build up a big enough team of blacksmiths.
So, there are still many tools that haven’t changed at all. We rely on the iconography to give us indications of the form that they need. So, the blacksmiths that we have on work are essentially tool smiths. They’re there to make and repair the tools that are required. So, they make both tools for the quarrymen and the stonemasons. And in the kind of last, well, 15 or so years they’ve also specialized in the axes and side axes used by the carpenters. And, for example, two of the blacksmiths who trained at Guédelon were part of the workshop that forged the axes for the rebuilding of Notre Dame. So that’s something that we’re very proud of.
Funding the Guédelon Project
WENDY GROUNDS: Can you talk to us about funding? I can imagine how necessary funding is for such a large project. How have you been able to source funding for such a long-term project as well?
SARAH PRESTON: The project initially got off the ground with funding from the European Union that played a really important role. There was money available back in ‘96/’97. There was what was known as the Da Vinci Fund. So that was funding for rural areas. That was very much Maryline’s job to get the funding to get this job off the ground. So, there was European funding, regional funding. Some of the first jobs that were created onsite, they were funded through government-based schemes. But we knew right from the beginning that we had three years to stand on our own two feet. So, we had three years to be self-financing.
Since the year 2000, Guédelon is entirely financed by visitors, the gift shop, and the restaurant. And that’s something, again, that we’re very proud of. It gives us a huge amount of freedom. It means that we can do what we like. We can make the decisions that we like. We’re not answering to another body. But it also means that our visitors are really special and precious to us because it’s thanks to them that this adventure has been able to get off the ground and continue for 27 years so far.
BILL YATES: That’s tremendous. I think of la Sagrada Familia, the project in Barcelona. And that’s been going on for over 100 years.
SARAH PRESTON: Yes. We’re just at the start.
BILL YATES: But the pace has really picked up. And I’m using air quotes here, but the pace has picked up because the number of visitors has grown so exponentially. You purchase a ticket to go see the site, and that provides them more resources and can speed up their timeline.
SARAH PRESTON: Yeah, for us it can also go the other way in that we’re building the castle. Initially we said it was going to take 25 years, and we’re already 27 years in. Now, it is true to say that, at the very beginning, no one really had any idea how long this project was going to take. 25 years, if anything, was a bit of a provocative move in this age when everything has to be done instantly, to say we’re going to take 25 years to do something.
The fact that we’re looking really, I should think, more at 30 to 40 years to finish the castle is linked to the fact that we have so many visitors because obviously the more visitors we have, the more we talk. Because we’re not just here to build the castle. Everyone who works here is there to do their job. And part of their job, a really important part, is communicate. So, when we’re recruiting blacksmiths, carpenters, stonemasons, we’re looking for people who are both technically really good, but are also very at ease explaining and talking about the work that they’re doing.
So at least half the time they’re putting down their tools. They’re stopping work in order to talk to visitors onsite. That means that we are taking a lot, lot longer than medieval builders would have taken. A castle such as Guédelon would have been built in something like 12 to 15 years. We’re going to take at least twice as long, if not longer. And that’s because we are also there to explain our work. We don’t have the Lord of Guédelon waiting for the keys to be handed over.
Safety Plans
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, I can imagine. And also, you’ve got to worry about the – or be concerned about the safety of all of those visitors. So, you’re checking on that, too, when they’re coming through, how they’re staying safe and staying away from areas where it could be more dangerous.
SARAH PRESTON: Absolutely. The safety of our visitors and our workers is always going to be our primary concern. And we’ve talked earlier about the compromises that we make in terms of safety for the workers and the costumes that they wear. We also have made compromises in terms of the scaffolding that we use. So, we’re using wooden scaffolding. We’re using putlog scaffolding, and this is the type of scaffolding that was used in the Middle Ages. So, the putlog is a horizontal beam, which is built into the wall. You leave a hole in the wall. As you build a wall, you create a hole, which the putlog will then be inserted into. You can place scaffold planks on the putlogs which are sticking out, and that creates a platform high up on the wall.
Now, we know that they were using this type of scaffolding because we have the evidence of putlog holes on ancient buildings. We also know because we have the illustrations on the manuscripts that we were talking about previously. However, we have heavily reinforced the scaffolding compared to the medieval models. The medieval models do not, for example, show safety barriers, toe boards, netting, and the modern nuts and bolts that we use. So, we’ve reinforced the scaffolding. We’re still using wooden scaffolding, but reinforced for the safety of the workers and, of course, as you said, the visiting public.
Planning Permission Process
WENDY GROUNDS: Sarah, did you have to apply for planning permission and was that process challenging?
SARAH PRESTON: We did, yeah, we had to apply for planning permission. And amazingly, that was an incredibly smooth process. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall on the day that they had people coming along to say “We want to build a castle.” But, yeah, no, it was a very smooth process.
BILL YATES: That is amazing.
Where to Build the Castle?
SARAH PRESTON: The reason that we chose this place to build a castle is for the presence of the materials that we find here. So, it’s a quarry that we’re building the castle in, an abandoned quarry. When the team found it back in ‘96, it was a quarry that had been abandoned since the ‘50s. It’s an ironstone quarry. We knew that we had more than enough stone. So that was the initial reason for choosing this location. But what we didn’t factor in at the time was that we also had an oak woodland. We found clay in the forest floor. There’s quarry sand that can be used for the mortar. There’s water.
And from materials that we found onsite we can make 16 different colors, a whole palette of colors, which we can use for decorating the inside of the castle. We have iron ore. So, we don’t produce all the mild steel that we use to make the tools, but we do have iron ore on site. And it’s certainly something that we’d like to master, so we carry out regular iron smeltings.
So, something that was a real revelation for the whole team was the way in which our landscape can provide us with all these different building materials. We’re so used now to going to the hardware shop, buying materials. We don’t know where they’ve come from. We’re literally taking the sand from the quarry, the clay from the forest floor, and transforming all of those into building materials. So that’s been a really exciting part of the project and not necessarily what we imagined when we first started.
BILL YATES: That’s so interesting. I hear many restaurant chefs and owners talk about farm to table. You know, they want pure ingredients. They want to control them. This is like earth to castle; right?
SARAH PRESTON: Exactly, yeah, exactly.
BILL YATES: You’re constructing right there. That’s interesting.
SARAH PRESTON: That’s exactly it, yes. But when you come today and look at the castle as it is, all the sandstone blocks that you see, we’ve literally just taken them from the quarry at the foot of the castle walls, extracted them, broken them into smaller pieces, transported them, and put them in the castle itself.
BILL YATES: Yes.
Collaborating with Advisory Committees
WENDY GROUNDS: The project also involves a lot of collaboration. You have some advisory committees, some scientific advisory committees. Can you just talk to us a little bit more about the role of this committee and how their input influences the construction at Guédelon?
SARAH PRESTON: Absolutely. So right from the beginning, we worked with archaeologists, art historians, castellologists – castle specialists. So initially we relied on them very, very heavily to give us models of castles to go and look at, to put us on the right road in terms of the stonework, so that we were building in the way that 13th-century builders would have worked. Archaeologists that helped us find the right recipe for the non-hydraulic lime mortar that we’re using, for example.
And then as years have moved by, that has really developed into a partnership because obviously what we’re now doing is feeding that data back to the archaeologists. So, they’re coming to us for answers. And we work with archaeologists from Lyon University, and we regularly attend seminars there where our master mason attends, often with a member of staff that could be a mason, a blacksmith, a carpenter, who then feeds back that data to researchers so that that can then help them in their work. So, what began very much as an advisory committee who had a really central role in how we worked has become a partnership with very much a to-and-fro between the site and the researchers.
Ren Love’s Projects of the Past
REN LOVE: Ren Love here with a glimpse into Projects of the Past; where we take a look at historical projects through the modern lens.
Usually, when we think of a ‘project’ we think of something that is being built – but that’s not always the case. Today’s project was about achieving something and being the fastest to do it: The Race to the South Pole in the early 1900s.
It may not be entirely fair to call it a race, because only one group knew they were racing the other. Robert Falcon Scott and his English crew planned to undertake a scientific expedition to Antarctica and planned to be the first to reach the South Pole. Originally, Roald Amundsen’s plan was to go to the North Pole, but Robert Peary got there first. So, Amundsen switched gears and planned to go South, keeping his plan a secret until he set sail. Amundsen was ultimately successful – reaching the South Pole a full 34 days before the Scott team.
Planning for a trip like this was no small feat – Amundsen spent years choosing the perfect team & raising funds. He was granted use of the Fram, a ship that had already been used in icy explorations, and the team landed the Fram in the Bay of Whales on Jan 14, 1911.
Amundsen set up base camp, where they built a wooden hut and a series of tunnels and rooms under the snow and ice – including a sauna. They set up well marked depots where they stashed over 7,500 pounds of supplies including seal meat & cooking fuel. They left basecamp in October, wearing furs clothes, custom ski boots, & traveling across snow with a large team of sledge dogs. And they reached the South Pole in just 55 days. All in all, the Amundsen’s full expedition took over a year and cost what would be equivalent to $285,000 USD today.
Was this project a success? Well, for Amundsen it was. Scott’s team did reach the South Pole, but they didn’t make it home. The legacy of both explorers does live on today in the form of the Scott – Amundsen South Pole Research Station. Ultimately, the great Race to the South Pole was both a triumph and tragedy.
Thanks for joining me for a look into Projects of the Past – I’m Ren Love. See ya next time.
13th Century Team Communication
BILL YATES: Sarah, one of the aspects to this that I was interested in asking you about is the communication. Communication is such an integral part of project management. But I was just thinking practically because, okay, again, we’re looking back at 13th-century practices. That means I cannot use a smartphone. I can’t use an Excel spreadsheet or email, or I can’t use Slack or some of the other tools that we’re frequently using as project managers. Talk to us a bit about how the team communicates because I know you have a large team. So how do they communicate with each other, both on the jobsite and then off the jobsite?
SARAH PRESTON: Well, very quickly we put in place weekly site meetings. So that’s a moment when everyone comes together, and it’s an opportunity for each of the different crafts to then communicate about where they’re at, what’s happening, what problems they’ve encountered. And for us to be aware, even if there aren’t particularly problems, it’s really interesting to know what your colleagues are working on. That’s something that was put in place very quickly and that we still adhere to. Then the master mason has the job of keeping on top of the objectives for each of the different crafts.
Of course, what’s really interesting at Guédelon is the absolute interdependence of one craft with another. So, there’s a constant communication going on, which is literally just shouting down from the wall, “Hey, I need this. Can you give me a hand with that?” That interdependence is lovely. And the carter has a really important role in this because obviously she’s moving around the site permanently, taking messages, communicating about the need, “Oh, I’ve just seen the masons. They say that they’re going to need this for tomorrow.” And so there’s a lot of oral communication going on, just people talking and explaining what they need.
Now, where we saw this kind of model of oral transmission break down was when members of staff started to retire, and we realized that we’d reproduced this oral model. But that meant that, once the person had gone, the information had gone, and that we were in danger of reproducing exactly what had happened in the 13th Century. Now, here we are trying to work out what would they have done, how would they have done it. And within 25 years we’ve done the same thing. So, it’s something that we’re addressing.
We now employ someone whose specific job is to record in detail the technical requirements of each craft so that we have a record, which makes it then easier when new members of staff come onboard to make sure that the knowledge that we’ve gained hasn’t been lost. Now, he also uses some 21st-century technology, which is filming and photographs to make sure that we have a record. But it’s so important. And it’s, again, not something that we thought about on day one, that the culture that you create within the business, how do you carry that on into the future? We’re kind of learning.
BILL YATES: That makes a lot of sense, and I can see how that would work so well to have some of these components. You have a weekly meeting. It sounds a lot like the types of questions and updates that are done in an Agile practice called a “daily standup.” You guys are actually transmitting some of the same information there that resonates with Agile. And then you have that floater, you have that person who’s going around, who’s connecting the dots and being that…
SARAH PRESTON: On top, yeah.
BILL YATES: …public communication to make sure that people stay in sync. You have a scribe who is keeping up with information. That’s awesome. And you’re doing all of this without Asana or Slack or any of these other tools. Well done. I’m applauding you.
SARAH PRESTON: Thank you. I’m not saying we always get it right. Obviously, you have humans and humans. And they’re always surprised. “You’re doing what? You’re making what? We didn’t know that.”
BILL YATES: That’s funny.
SARAH PRESTON: Yeah, keeping on top of communication, as you say, it’s so important in any organization and on any construction site. But so far, talking has got us a long way.
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, do you have a gong or a trumpet or something if there’s a general announcement?
SARAH PRESTON: Well, we have a bell which we ring for the visitors to say we’re going to be using the treadmill winch. That’s a great opportunity for them to watch that piece of lifting equipment in action. We have the bell which is run at lunchtime. This is France, very important moment. And then the bell that’s rung at the end of the day. But apart from that, no. If there are announcements to be made, you get on your horse – no. You walk across site. People spend a lot of the time walking around and shouting.
Staff Training
WENDY GROUNDS: Do you do training of your staff? When someone comes and wants to work there, you know, are they all skilled when they arrive? Or do you actually train people who want to just join the project?
SARAH PRESTON: When we initially started the project, right in the very early days, there was one professional in each of the different crafts who was there to train other members of the team who very often had absolutely no experience in that particular area. Because when we first started off, this was also a job creation scheme, and it was about getting long-term unemployed back into the workplace. 25, 26, 27 years later, that’s not necessarily the case.
When we look to employ, for example, a mason, we’ll look for someone who has had heritage skills training. So, someone who’s either come through a school – there are luckily quite a few schools left in France which offer heritage masonry skills, at least. Often these are people who’ve done an internship with us. So we know them. We know how they work. And as I was saying earlier, we know that they’re good communicators.
Other skills have to be learned on the job. You cannot go to school and learn to be a quarryman in France today. So, the quarryman who’s working with us currently is someone who had a background in stonemasonry, but just was really passionate about the quarry, about learning how to extract blocks, how to read the rock, how to find those natural weaknesses. And so, he’s learned on the job. That also happens a lot.
What we do find, and this is what we mentioned again earlier, is that there is a phase of sometimes having to unlearn certain skills. So that there’ll be skills linked, for example, when I think about carpentry, working with green wood, which means having to work slightly differently from timber that’s come from a sawmill and is all perfectly square.
Unique Project Challenges
SARAH PRESTON: I think one of the big challenges for all the workers onsite is unlearning some of the modern skills that they come to the site with. So, learning to step back from modern practices. And that’s something that all the different crafts have talked about. In terms of measurements, we do use feet and inches, which obviously is a bit of a cultural shock to the French. However, very fortunately for us, we’re not using the Anglo-Saxon inch. We’re using the inch measurement that we found Ratilly House just down the road because, in the 13th Century, measurements vary from region to region. And the inch measurement is two and a half centimeters, which makes conversion so much easier.
Guedelon Project Lessons Learned
BILL YATES: Well, with a project like this, there must be so many lessons learned, so many discoveries. What are some of the lessons learned or discoveries that you and the team have made as you step through this wonderful project?
SARAH PRESTON: Well, I think one of the early lessons that we learned and that was then useful to the archaeologists that we work with was about the quality of finish, whether that’s on a stone or a piece of wood, because I think we came into this wanting to show we were good stonemasons. And the very first stones that were dressed here are all amazing. Everything’s perfectly flush, beautifully finished.
And at some point through our own observations and through the proper comments from the committee that we work with, we realized that we were going to have to adjust that; that a good stonemason isn’t necessarily just able to complete work to a certain standard; that the budget involved is also really important; that we’re building the type of castle that would have belonged to a fairly modest, fairly local, he’s got a good network – we’ve created this fictional character. He’s in a good network, but nevertheless he’s not a duke. He’s not a prince. And he’s not a count. And that needs to be reflected in the finish of the work that we produce.
So, through observing archaeological sites, we then changed the way we worked to produce a much rougher finish. And that’s something that’s a discussion that’s going on at the moment. We’ve got lots of our young apprentices in the carpentry workshop who are again wanting to show they’re really good and to produce beautifully finished beams. Of course, they’re way too good for a footbridge that will give peasants access to the garden; you know? So, we have to adapt. So that was something that was really important.
And important for us is when you look at an archaeological site, to not make the mistake of seeing a piece of stonework that doesn’t look necessarily as elaborate as another and think, oh that must have been done by the apprentice. Not necessarily. There’s a budget, and you have to work within the budget, and that means changing the way you work. So that was one of the first kind of interesting observations we made.
In terms of the raising of the roof timbers, this was a really interesting time because we’d assembled the A-frames. They were all assembled flat on the floor. The first ones were quite easy. We could then put a system of pulleys in place and then hoist them up into a vertical position. So far, so good. Once we got to the end of the great hall – so you’ve got your gable walls at each end, your stone gable walls. Once you get to the last 14 trusses, there isn’t room to lay them vertically, and so how are you going to get those last ones from flat to vertical?
So this was a big question. And the head carpenter had mulled over this for a long time. And it was, interestingly, through a discussion with a visitor that he came up with a hypothesis. So the idea was to have a beam sticking out from that western gable wall. But in fact, what we did was we hoisted all the trusses into a vertical position, stacked them to one end, inserted this beam. And then, like files in a filing cabinet, we slid the trusses into position. So this was a hypothesis. We can’t be sure this is how they did it. But this is how we did it, and it worked fine.
We then came back up to the office that very day, opened a book, and there we found an illustration of a gable with a beam sticking out with trusses on it. So, it was just this amazing moment of, like, oh we were onto the good idea. But that was just a wonderful moment, the fact that on the very same day that we should come across that piece of evidence. So again, that’s an example of how, being faced with a practical problem of how are we going to do it, you have to come up with a solution. And obviously we have to be modest. We have to be cautious. All we’re ever doing is putting forward a hypothesis which may or may not be an answer to the problem that 13th-century builders were confronted with. But that’s one example.
Another example would be the flour mill that we’ve built. A team of archaeologists found the remains of a flour mill in the east of France, and then our team has produced a working model. And that has allowed the archaeologists to really change their kind of preconceptions about how much flour could be produced, how fast the mill wheel needed to be spinning to produce X amount of flour. Following our team and the work that they’ve done there, they can then take away real data about flour production in the 13th Century, and it’s changed the figures that they were working with. We were able to say, no, no, it can work. The mill wheels can turn much more slowly and still produce flour efficiently.
Modelling a Vault Build
BILL YATES: Yeah, for project managers when they’re building something that they’ve not built before, you know, whether it’s something digital like a website or some computer code, or if it’s something physical like a product that the customer will use, prototyping and modeling are so important. You know, that way we can try something and see if it’s going to work. Have you guys had experiences like that with these construction processes where you’re thinking, okay, how are we going to do this? Did you start small, like with a model or a small sample and then proof of concept it, or how’d you do it?
SARAH PRESTON: The mill’s a good example. Yeah, we didn’t actually make the model, but a model was made. And then it was a question of putting it together, taking it apart, putting it back together. That was because we didn’t really know where we were going. You know, we had to kind of feel our way forward. When it came to vault building, well, we knew what the finished result had to look like because there are lots still standing. What we had to do was go through the process of getting from the vault in kit form to a structure that was under load and going to support a metric ton of weight.
And I’ve loved the process of watching the team growing confidence through practice, basically. The first vault was built back in 2002. It was a very young team. Maryline, who was there on the day, describes everyone being just green, absolutely sick with worry. This was the day that they were going to bring the first vault under load. Was it going to work? Everyone was terrified. They had provisions stocked under the vault in case of an accident. By the time we built the last vault, everyone was incredibly casual, just from that confidence of knowing how to go about the work itself.
But yeah, initially, when it came to lowering the centering, you’ve got the stone skeleton, which is built on a wooden centering. When you build a vault, the first stone you place is the keystone, as opposed to an arch where you place the keystones at the end. So, to build your vault, you place your key, and then you build up, you build your ribs up to the keystone and, once that skeleton is in position, you strike the center. You have to lower the centering just by a few inches so that that stone structure comes under load, you hope. So, this is when you apply the five-minute rule. If it stays in place for five minutes, you’re good. It will stay for five centuries.
And to do this, we lower the centering, which is positioned on wooden wedges. Each branch of the six-branch centering is placed on wooden wedges, which are fixed head to tail, and then they have to be hammered apart. So, we work as a team and we very gently hammer those wedges apart. That brings the wooden centering down. And as soon as you see daylight between the stones and the wood, that’s when you kind of hold your breath and wait until all is good. So those moments, which went from being incredibly tense and anxiety inducing, went to being a real pleasure.
Measuring Success
WENDY GROUNDS: If you’re looking at the success of the project, are you measuring how far the build is and how well we’re doing? Or are you also looking at just the cultural objectives? Like, what are we pulling out of this, knowledge-wise? Which is more important?
SARAH PRESTON: I think they both really go hand in hand. In some ways the castle, impressive as it is, is simply bearing witness to the skills acquired by the men and women on the ground. And I guess ultimately those skills are more important. Because just as in the 13th Century a team of vault builders could move on to the next town and the next cathedral and spread the art of Gothic architecture throughout Europe, teams here are also able to go on and contribute on different sites, obviously Notre Dame being one of them. And in many ways, yeah, the Guédelon Castle stands as witness to all our work, our struggles, you know, the struggles to find the right way to communicate, the struggles to make sure that the visitors have access, the struggles to record the work and the lessons learned.
So, I guess, yeah, the castle is measured both in the height of the walls and the strength of the castle itself, but also in men and women who have gained this knowledge, who are sharing that knowledge and inspiring future generations. And something that I’ve really seen shift, and obviously Guédelon is just one part of this cultural movement, but it’s very gratifying to see that today in France manual trades are starting to be seen in a very different light than they were 15, 20 years ago. People are starting to understand that, to work with your hands, you have to work with your head, and that it’s not a lesser skill.
And it’s really exciting to see these really bright men and women coming here and saying, “I want to be a carpenter.” “I could have been an architect, I could have been an engineer, but this is what I want to do.” “I want to be a really good stonemason.” And they’re bringing all of that skill and all of that dedication to building Guédelon, but those skills can be used to restore the real castles, churches, and cathedrals that are in desperate need of care.
Leadership Lessons
BILL YATES: Sarah, what leadership lessons or takeaways have you had from this project? As you’ve been involved in it and observed the different behaviors on the team, what leadership lessons have you had?
SARAH PRESTON: It’s interesting, we started talking about sound, didn’t we, at the beginning. And Maryline also talks about sound in terms of her leadership, that she can stand outside and, just from listening, knows if everything’s okay. And it’s something that I’ve realized just recently I’d started to incorporate, and I knew what she was talking about. Something was happening, it was like, that’s not right. Let’s go and have a look. And it’s something that she has relied on very early on. It’s just the music of the site. Is everyone in tune? Is everyone working together? Does something need sorting out over here? That noise indicates to me that something needs repairing
And so, coming back to these very basic senses of sight, of sound, of smell, being really in tune with the site and the people working there, I think that’s something that Maryline has relied on hugely, in an almost kind of animal way, to make sure everyone’s okay.
WENDY GROUNDS: How long have you been at Guedelon working on this project?
SARAH PRESTON: Scarily, nearly 20 years. I always – I still feel like the new girl because there’s so much to learn. And I came here without a background in architecture or engineering or archaeology so I’ve had to learn so much, first of all in French, and then to find the technical translations in English. So yeah, I feel like I’m just starting out. And then when I looked at my pay slip the other day, it was like, ooh, 18 years.
Guedelon Project Completion
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s amazing. We can see how much you love it. When is the anticipated day of completion? Like you said, it may not, but when are they kind of thinking it’s going to end?
SARAH PRESTON: Apparently, we’re looking at 10 years of building work on the castle, more or less. The gatehouse needs completion. The corner tower is well underway. The great tower, that’s going to take some work because there’s another 30 feet still to go on the great tower. And the wooden hoarding which needs to go in place will require a lot of research. We still don’t know exactly how we’re going to do that.
So, 10 years for the castle. But in parallel to the castle construction, we’re going to start new projects. In fact, we’ve already started building an oven in the village area just to the east of the castle. We’re going to build a church because there’s a small chapel within the castle walls, but that would very much be for the lord and his family. For the local population, they would have needed a place of worship. So that will start off as a chapel. If the bishop agrees, that can then become a church, a parish church.
The idea isn’t just to finish the castle, lock the door, and walk away. We want to continue building, continue showing visitors well into the future the different techniques that were used in the 13th Century. So I would say Guédelon is a never-ending story.
Find Out More
WENDY GROUNDS: Very good, very good. Yeah, how can our listeners find out more if they want to find out about the castle?
SARAH PRESTON: Obviously, I would invite them to come visit us. There’s no better way than to experience Guédelon in person. But we have a website. We also have a newsletter. You can sign up to the newsletter, and we’ll send you updates. And probably the best and quickest way is Whisper it. Not very 13th Century.
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s wonderful. I will put links into the transcript so that folk can find it.
SARAH PRESTON: Thank you.
BILL YATES: This has been fantastic, Sarah. It’s so interesting, this project, and all that can be learned by stepping back in time, simplifying approaches, taking out the modern tools that we have, and then getting down to the basics. And some of the principles that you’ve covered: leadership, communication, try things out. We have to try things and see if they work. We deeply appreciate you sharing, giving us a look behind the curtain, behind the wall.
SARAH PRESTON: Well, if you ever get a chance to come to France and visit us, we’d love to show you around.
BILL YATES: Yes.
WENDY GROUNDS: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
SARAH PRESTON: Thank you. Thank you for your time.
Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s it for us here on Manage This. Thank you for joining us today. You can visit us at Velociteach.com, where you can subscribe to this podcast and see a complete transcript of the show.
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