It happens that I am mesmerised whenever I watch someone create something of beauty. It feels very special, for example, when I see a potter place a shapeless lump of clay on her wheel and then, using her hands moulds that clay into a beautiful vase. And the feeling is similar when I see a designer paint a pattern on a sheet of paper which is destined to be used as a ‘repeat’. I get a similar pleasure when I watch artisans use their hands and the simplest of tools to tile a roof or to build a wall. 

With the building of a small extension to our house in France I have been spoiled. Yes, the work brought moments of annoyance and frustration as progress slowed or rubble gathered, but these feelings were outweighed by the joy I had when watching Arnaud our maçon, for example as he methodically and with an eye for beauty built one of our extension’s stone walls (see the illustration).

Around fifteen years ago I discovered the skill of maçons when, for several weeks, I worked as a ‘pair-of-hands’ for an experienced maçon – Jean-Claude – and watched closely how he built a wall in our Tréguennec garden. Over the years the said Jean-Claude has become a close friend and at the moment he is helping us by overseeing the building of the new extension. With him now in the wings it is Arnaud who is the maçon centre-stage.

Since completing his apprenticeship some twenty years ago, Arnaud has been building walls in and around our area in Brittany – interestingly, in working on our own extension he is within a few kilometres of where he was born and grew up. Like Jean-Claude, he does not use bricks or breeze blocks, rather he builds with the local stones of yellow-brown schiste – a stone of which all the old houses in our area have been built for centuries. 

Arnaud makes no secret of how he loves working with stones, which he sees as things of beauty. He also delights in choosing each stone in turn, sometimes cutting them to shape with his hammer and chisel, and uses them to make a wall that will last. He puts very little cement between the stones – what holds the wall together is the way in which each stone fits in place as it is laid. 

But in his work on our extension, a key challenge for Arnaud was to match, and to extend imperceptibly, the looks, the ‘rhythm’ and the overall impression given by the wall of our old outhouse that has been standing for around two hundred years. But such matching was potentially difficult as the stones originally used are now increasingly difficult to find. 

Knowing the problem, before Arnaud arrived Jean-Claude had scoured the area searching for stones that could be used. From one pile owned by the town hall and another of now-rejected stones lying next to a dilapidated house, he collected together perhaps a hundred stones of all shapes and sizes that might ‘do’. These were then spread out over our lawn so allowing Arnaud to scan them all and then with great care select and put in place the one he needed. In all, building took around ten days

The photo in the illustration, which was taken just after the wall was finished, shows what he achieved. The two walls join along a line that runs down from the new, and as yet unconnected, gutter downpipe, and this is undetectable. The way Arnaud has overlapped the stones of the old and the new walls makes the join to all intents and purposes invisible. Equally, the size and mix of successive courses makes the two walls indistinguishable. Here one sees the work of a master of his trade.

And in the wall there is one stone that is very special. High on the left of the illustration, just below the tip of the, as yet, unfitted down-pipe, there is a large, squarish stone that abuts the granite lintel. That stone was not bought but comes from the original part of our outhouse. It was one of the stones we found when we knocked a hole through the wall to make a passage to the extension. Having one stone in the new wall that brought with it a 200-year-old link with the original building felt important. Moreover, it was a link Arnaud embraced entirely. 

As well as being a challenge, the extension with its beautifully crafted new wall offers something unique, precious and irreplaceable. Arnaud’s skill, like that of all maçons, will now be on display for generations. 

The illustration shows a photo of a section of the new wall of our extension with every stone chosen and put in place by Arnaud who is standing in front of his ‘masterpiece’.

For helping me write this blog, I would like to thank Jean-Claude, Arnaud, Jeni, Rohan and Vivien.