Tucked in the hills of northwest Arkansas near Harrison, stands the circle of abandoned, white limestone rocks testimony to Michel Guyot’s failed dreams of building a French styled castle in Arkansas. Guyot had visited a similar castle building in France and seen the skills and techniques used in the 13th century. Knowing that most Americans would never be able to visit the castle, he bought the land, set up a welcome center and began hiring and training men and women to build a medieval castle in the states.
Having heard of the project, my husband mentioned it recently as we approached the area. He wanted to see it. An Internet search for “Castle in Arkansas” yielded several links to stories and pictures of the castle in the process of being built.
Each posting declared, “No longer open.” Lack of interest and funding brought a demise to Guyot’s great idea. The building of a castle never brought in the 150,000 visitors needed to sustain the project. Cutting back, laying off workers and raising the entrance fee also did not generate enough money to sustain the castle in the making.
We wanted to at least see where it had been. Our GPS path took us through the Ozarks Mountains past farms house and rolling hills to the sign declaring, “Building a castle, come and see.”
We followed the rutted path used by contractors and drove down the gravel road to a faded, peeling sign in the shape of a knight’s shield that declared, “Welcome Center.”
The locked doors did not welcome us. An onsite contractor said he was converting the buildings to apartments. He knew nothing about the castle project.
We walked through the overgrown paths, stepped over mud puddles and entered a wooded area where we found models of the proposed structures. An excellent idea since Guyot anticipated it would take 20 years to complete the castle using the ancient techniques. The wooden model of a fort and a stone castle about eight feet across in diameter stood on one side of the path, the miniature stone fortress with finished gates and windows laid out on the other side. We studied a circle of short sticks arranged in upright positions in a manner reminiscent of an early American fort. On the path before us we saw the full-sized circle of upright poles of trees set in a circle. Formidable spears of trees formed the walls, but no gate forbade entrance. Neither model included any dwellings.
Walking through the woods we passed roughly constructed, wooden storage and work shelters to the edge of the woods. There before us lay the foundations and lower walls of a modern castle or, more accurately, a small fortress. Inside the turrets, low windows followed the pattern we had seen in Old Fort Niagara: wide windows narrowed to slits just wide enough for an archer to shoot an arrow at an enemy. The recent rains had left a marshy floor in the abandoned foundations. Cattails grew inside a completely walled area. Three feet wide walls outlined the no longer future fortress. We walked on the broad circular path made by the laid blocks until a sign, laying flat on the blocks, reprimanded us, “Do not walk on the walls.”
At the foot of the hill, a black smith shop had evidently once garnered a great deal of activity. Weather worn harnesses and leather leads lined the pole rails. To the left of the furnace, huge leather bellows, that once produced enough wind to push a child, now hung limply.
The silence told no secrets, but we found a few. From inside a primitive, cupboard drooped the blue coils of a once hidden air compressor. On the wall hung a 20th century caulking gun.
A catapult model outlined the design for the nearly completed catapult stored under the A-frame shelter. Someone had begun an intricate scrolled design in its richly polished wood.
A collection of other medieval appliances and structures scattered the area: A stone oven for baking bread, or to be used as a kiln, lacked something in its basic structure. It had already collapsed. A potter’s wheel with foot turning stone no longer produced pottery.
A wooden plow grooved its blade forever in the same spot. Rough wooden benches and tables offered a picnic area to the guests who no longer came. The wooden roof beams of one structure had already collapsed over its unfinished promise of shelter. A small arch of wooden blocks promised a wooden wheel that will never be finished. An empty corral held no horses to wear the harnesses waiting to be stitched in the black smith’s shop. We assumed the large structure with 10 feet turning wheel in the middle of the fortress once served somehow to lift the heavy rocks into place.
We made our way carefully up the hill and back to our vehicle.
We had seen the castle foundation, the models, the fort, the catapult, the pottery shed and the horseless corral.
Only time will tell if a second investor discovers the way to finish the castle or if this once exotic idea will simply become another piece of folklore in the Ozarks of Arkansas.
(Joan Hershberger is a staff writer for the El Dorado News-Times. She can be reached at joanh@everybody.org)