There’s no heart in sawmill wood,” he says. If Notre Dame’s roof lasted 800 years, it is because of this. If this place didn’t exist, perhaps the experts would have said: no it’s not possible to reproduce the roof of Notre Dame. There are people outside of here who can do it now, but I tell you they all came here to learn how. “We have 25 years’ experience of cutting, squaring and hewing wood by hand,” he says. He explains how hand-hewing each beam – a single piece from a single tree – respects the “heart” of the green wood that gives it its strength and resistance. Boudy, 51, trained as a baker, then an electrician, until discovering his vocation at Guédelon. Stéphane Boudy is one of a small team of carpenters at the medieval site, where he has worked since 1999. It might be quicker and cheaper to turn wooden beams out of a sawmill – especially with French president Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to reopen the ravaged cathedral in 2024 – but you will not find anyone at Guédelon who believes it should be done that way. “But we knew it could be done because Guédelon has been doing it for years.”Ī number of the companies bidding for the Notre Dame work have already engaged carpenters trained at Guédelon, and more are expected to beat a path to the Burgundy clearing 200km down the autoroute du Soleil from Paris. Photograph: Alexis Lopez/ZEPPELIN/SIP/REX/Shutterstock Hopes are pinned on Guédelon know-how to restore its famous La Fôret roof. “After the fire, there were a lot of people saying it would take thousands of trees, and we didn’t have enough of the right ones, and the wood would have to be dried for years, and nobody even knew anything about how to produce beams like they did in the Middle Ages. “The roof frame was extremely sophisticated, using techniques that were advanced for the 12th and 13th centuries,” Frédéric Épaud, a medieval wood specialist, tells the Observer. The widespread view was that it would be impossible to rebuild it as it was. Paris’s imposing 13th-century cathedral, a world heritage site, was consumed by fire in April 2019, destroying its complex roof structure, known as La Forêt because of the large number of trees used in its construction. Now, in an unforeseen twist of fate, Guédelon is playing a vital role in restoring the structure and soul of Notre Dame cathedral. Instead of digging down it has been built upward, using only the tools and methods available in the Middle Ages and, wherever possible, locally sourced materials. The Guédelon project was dreamed up as an exercise in “experimental archaeology” 25 years ago.
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