Ringen Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

The Ringenhof is a small late neoclassical château with Palladian touches, set in a landscaped park beside the Nète at Lier. It was built around 1838 for Auguste Berckmans (1803–1865) on the site of a former hof, a probable late medieval redoubt that had become a country house, so as to give the owner an estate befitting his standing; the attribution of the design to Louis Berckmans, physician and botanist, remains a hypothesis. The rectangular building has two storeys beneath a flat roof; its five-bay south façade is adorned with a central portico of colossal Doric columns. The park contains a number of garden buildings: a Swiss chalet from the 1840s, a pagoda serving as a dovecote or duck house, a wooden tea pavilion, a neogothic ruin above the ice house, a skittle alley, neoclassical bridges and a lime-tree arbour. The quarter-circle orangery and the tropical greenhouse with Ionic columns are in a very dilapidated state. Sold in 1896 to the Antwerp family Lowet-Van Melsen, the estate was abandoned in 1960; it found new owners in the 1990s, who had the park restored from 1997 onwards. The château and estate have been protected since 24 October 1995.