The axe head, heated by the flames of Mathieu Collette’s forge, glows white hot among the coals.
Collette, a blacksmith who uses traditional methods to fashion tools from iron and steel, pulls it from the fire and, with a series of hammer blows, moulds it into shape.
Meanwhile, in France, possibly at this very moment, carpenters are using axes he fashioned to carve logs of red oak into roof trusses for Notre-Dame-de-Paris, the world’s most famous cathedral.
The axes had to be as close as possible to the originals used by the carpenters who first built the cathedral in the 12th and 13th centuries
