Kasteel Ter Borcht

En un regard

Le château en bref

Kasteel Ter Borcht, in Meulebeke (West Flanders), is a castle with a seventeenth-century core, built on a motte surrounded by a moat. It was the seat of the lordship of Meulebeke and is attested as a residence of its lords as early as 1214. The layout of the estate still matches that of the parish cadastre of 1654. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a small chapel with a sacristy was added to the west, and a local pilgrimage began around the middle of the century. Around 1863 the castle was enlarged, notably with an approach avenue to the east, which gave it most of its present appearance, with rendered walls, sandstone quoins, steeply pitched roofs and stepped gables on the east side. Two octagonal gate towers of red brick with slate spires are the best-preserved elements of the seventeenth-century enclosure. A neo-Gothic pilgrimage chapel with a hexagonal plan, built in 1886 and decorated with mural paintings by Edgar van Bavegem, lord of the castle, is dedicated to Our Lady of Good Help. The park, with its motte, moat, old oak trees and beech hedges, already appears on the Ferraris map (1770–1778). The castle is listed as a monument, and the estate as a site, by decree of 3 March 1976.