Kasteel van Rummen

En un regard

Le château en bref

About one kilometre west of the village of Rummen, halfway to Geetbets along the long Kasteellaan, an isolated brick tower standing in a pond marks the site of the castle of the counts of Hoen. Rummen, now a section of Geetbets in Flemish Brabant, belonged under the Ancien Régime to the county of Loon, on the border with present-day Limburg. This castle was not the original feudal stronghold: that fortress, besieged and razed in 1365, stood west of the village, on the wooded hill known as the Warande. The residence was built in 1629 by Jean de Hoen, who had recently been elevated to the rank of count. It was a complex surrounded by water. A massive gatehouse with a drawbridge gave access, to the south, to an outer courtyard of three wings flanked by two round towers and provided with a baroque chapel with a hexagonal bell turret; a bridge then led to the seigneurial house, square in plan and flanked by four round towers. Beyond the moat lay an enclosed garden of eight square parterres edged with box, in a Renaissance style. Partially burned in 1657 and then restored, the castle is known from the engraving by Sanderus and from a drawing by Remacle Leloup around 1740, which shows a house that had become a country residence with large mullioned windows. After the extinction of the Hoen de Cartiels line, the estate passed to Pierre Van den Bossche of Tienen; his widow had the remains of the outer courtyard demolished in 1837, and the house disappeared around 1906. What survives is the south-east corner tower, in ruins, and the neighbouring U-shaped farm, which was worked until the 1980s. The tower and farm have been listed as protected monuments since 7 April 1995, within the protected site "Kasteel van Rummen met omgeving"; a restoration begun around 1990 was never completed.