Kasteel van Neerhespen

En un regard

Le château en bref

Neerhespen Castle, at Geldenakenstraat 3 in Linter (Flemish Brabant), was originally a presbytery built in the last quarter of the eighteenth century on the right bank of the Petite Gète, to the north of the village. Sold as national property during the Revolution, it was converted around 1800 into a country house, hence its designation as a ‘château’. In the 1831 cadastral survey it belonged to the judge Marc Guillaume Raeymaeckers. Between 1840 and 1860 the rear façade was altered, and a new driveway crossed the Gète to the entrance door. Around 1880, Bonaventure Raeymaeckers acquired the neighbouring orchard and laid out a 2.5-hectare landscape park there. The building, of brick with sandstone dressings and an L-shaped plan, has two storeys beneath hipped roofs; the courtyard façade is rendered white. The present garden, a sunken parterre inspired by the boulingrin and surrounded by terraces, banks, hedges and clipped yews, was redesigned in 1975 by Jacques Wirtz with the architect R. Rombouts.