At the Independent, John Lichfield on the thirteenth-century castle currently being built by hand in Burgundy (but I hope the workers are not wearing medieval footwear):
The rear defensive wall and two towers are almost complete. So are the great hall and seigneur's chamber and the bedroom for visiting royalty. The roof of the living quarters, or "north range", is almost finished with timber beams hewn from the nearby forest. The roof beams are half-covered with tiles handmade on the site using clay mined a few yards away.
The 50 or so labourers work in medieval clothes. A committee of academic experts advises on what is medievally correct. Most of the materials, and many of the tools, are quarried, gathered or made on site: the stones, the mortar, the ropes, the nails, the saws, the timber, the wooden lifting-engines. There are no cranes or bulldozers or breezeblocks or pneumatic drills or load-bearing steel joists. The chapel tower contains the first rib-vaulted roof to be made with purely medieval techniques for 600 years.
This is so very cool, and one contemporary structure that will probably be here a few hundred years from now.
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