The well, the elder statesman of the French garden

The regional forms

The French well cover was never uniform. The Périgord and the Quercy favour tall domes with crossed ribs, topped with a pine cone — you see them on the honey-stone wells of the bastide towns. Brittany and Normandy prefer flat or shallow crowns, as sober as the granite they close, sometimes edged with a simple frieze of ogees. Franche-Comté and Burgundy have their four-sided pyramids on square built wells; Provence, its plain arched hoops under the pulley headstock, where the cover steps back behind the drawing gear. Knowing these registers is what makes it possible to draw a cover that looks as though it were born with the well — which is exactly what the workshop does from a photograph of your well and your region.

Reproducing an antique cover

Does your well still have its original cover, but eaten away, loose or incomplete? Two routes. Restoration where the structure is sound: shot-blasting, straightening, reworking the joints in the traditional way, galvanising and painting — and the original piece is good for another fifty years. Exact reproduction where the iron is too far gone: from photographs and a survey, the workshop forges the exact drawing — ribs, scrolls, apex ornament — in new solid galvanised iron. Allow 15 to 25 % over the catalogue drawings, and the satisfaction of seeing the well recover its own face. For the memory of this craft, Ferronnerie Pongi traces the history of an art metalwork workshop and its traditional techniques.

Within protected areas in France (the surroundings of listed monuments, remarkable heritage sites), the opinion of the Architecte des Bâtiments de France may apply to visible elements: our dimensioned drawings and the manufacturing certificate (solid iron, traditional joints) make up the file. It is a formality we know well.