Kasteel Rotsart de Hertaing

En un regard

Le château en bref

Rotsart de Hertaing Castle, also known as De Kuyl or Kasteel De Populieren, is a neoclassical country house in Merelbeke, East Flanders. Its old core bears the date 1774 on a side wall, but the site is much older: the historian K.G. Van Acker links it to the ‘Stede Hukkelgem’, mentioned in 1396, and an archaeological note recalls that, according to historical sources, it may have originated as a Frankish settlement, which in the Middle Ages became a moated court with an upper court and a lower court. In the nineteenth century, the estate passed to the Leirens family and then to the Van Goethem family; in 1887, a marriage brought it into the noble family Rotsart de Hertaing, of Scottish origin, whose motto ‘Think on’ still adorns the chimneypiece in the entrance hall. Enlarged in the mid-nineteenth century, probably by the architect L. Minard, the building is a double house of nine bays, with whitewashed rendered façades raised on a plinth of blue stone. Let as offices since 1973, it was restored in 1974; the moat has now been filled in, but the access avenues and the pentagonal lower court survive.