Led by master mason Matthias Garn, a crack team of German journeyman stonemasons and apprentices are working between 50 to 60 hours a week to finish painstaking work on St Michael’s Church tower before Christmas.

And by wearing traditional dress and only using traditional tools, such as wooden mallets and chisels, the journeymen are following a long line of craftsmen dating back to the Middle Ages.

As tradition dictates, they must leave their home towns for three years, armed only with their tools and the clothes on their back, surviving on the skills they learnt as apprentices.

Matthias, whose family orginates from Dresden, in eastern Germany, has seen stonemasonry bewitch several generations of his family, including brother Thomas, who is helping him at St Michael’s.

And even during the Russian occupation of his home town the trade has remained the same as “30 years, 50 years or 300 years ago”.

Matthias said: “Time stopped. The Russians and communism came in. We didn’t develop which was a good thing for the craft.”

As a master stonemason, it is his job to pass on this knowledge to apprentices which is his most important job. He said: “The whole idea is once you become a master and you do all your qualifications, you are the link to the next generation. I am now chose. I have to teach and now I have all my own apprentices.”

Following his own apprenticeship, Matthias was invited to become a master mason. The next seven years were spent working under experts with another two years spent in the classroom – learning about the theory of engineering, business, design and developing his teaching skills.

Now he teaches at York College and, through his business, helps develop his “hardworking” English apprentices, Tom Soare and David Land, of Kirby Grindalythe.

It is a career which has taken him all over Europe from France and Switzerland through to Denmark before he settled in Bugthorpe, England. Among the many places he has worked in his 18-year working life are at Sandringham, St Andrew’s Church in York, Blenheim Palace and in Pocklington, where he recreated the preaching cross in Pocklington.

Matthias said: “I think it is always very challenging and very interesting. I do love to work on old buildings and this is what I try to encourage to my guys – that they love what they do so they love to go to work.”

The Rev Peter Bowes, parish priest of St Michael’s Church, praised the work of Matthias and the journeymen stonemasons, who have – so far – re-built the walls around the belfry openings and the buttress, strengthening it and tying it properly to the tower.

He said: “Having these journeymen working on the tower adds to the interest of the project, which already has a pretty international workforce.”