En un regard
Le château en bref
Kasteel Vieil Escaut, now known as Kasteel ter Schelde, stands at Heusden, a district of the municipality of Destelbergen, at 10–12 Bommelsrede. It is less a castle in the military sense than an early twentieth-century country villa, built around 1910 for the de Sejournet de Rameignies family. Its French name, ‘Vieil Escaut’, refers to the site: the house overlooks an old arm of the Escaut, a meander already cut off from the main course by the time the Ferraris map was surveyed (around 1771–1778).
The house adopts a neo-Louis XVI vocabulary. Built of brick with parts in natural stone, it is a double-fronted house of five bays, two storeys over a plinth, under a hipped roof covered in slate. On the garden side, a large rectangular porch surmounted by a balcony occupies the centre of the rear elevation. The right-hand side gable is animated by a projecting window bay finished with a bell-shaped (bell-cast) gable. The name of the architect is not recorded in the inventory.
The park was probably laid out at the same time as the house. Originally it stretched between the D'Haenestraat and the Puntweg, and the entrance was at the corner of the D'Haenestraat and the Bommelsrede, before being moved further south. Only the core of the estate survives, an area of roughly 1.4 hectares. A bowling green-type lawn, laid out between the villa and the street, opens up the view of the façade from the public space.
The building has been listed in the Flemish inventory of architectural heritage since the survey of Destelbergen carried out in the 1980s. Designated as ‘vastgesteld’ heritage in 2009 under the name Kasteel Vieil Escaut, it has been since 20 June 2023 under the extended name ‘Kasteeldomein Vieil Escaut’, which includes the park. It is a private property; the estate can be seen from the public road.
