Qualla: Baarland Castle

Baarland Castle: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerard Dukker, CC BY-SA 4.0. When A. Feenstra walked away from the radio-and-television shop in Vlissingen in August 1965, he was looking for a quiet country house to store his antiques. What he bought instead, from a Mrs. Pompoene for an unrecorded sum, were the foundations and partial walls of a medieval water castle that had been demolished in 1840 and was now mostly a damp ring of moat on Zuid-Beveland. He and his wife, neither of them builders, decided to put it back together themselves. The early years were rough - the first attempts at pouring concrete on the old wall foundations went, as the chronicler delicately puts it, quite wrong - but they kept going. The castle that stands at Baarland today is the work of an amateur couple from Hallum who refused to let what they had bought stay broken.

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Image: Gerard Dukker | CC BY-SA 4.0

Baarland Castle: Older Than Its Current Building

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerard Dukker, CC BY-SA 4.0. On a seventeenth-century engraving of the site, a motte - the artificial earthen mound that supports an early medieval keep - is drawn next to the castle, which suggests the very first version of Baarland Castle was a motte-and-bailey. That earlier structure has vanished into the...

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Image: Gerard Dukker | CC BY-SA 4.0

Baarland Castle: Battles, a Killing, and a Marriage

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J.P. de Koning, CC BY-SA 4.0. The recorded history opens in 1295 with the Battle of Baarland, when a pro-Holland Zeeland army defeated a Flemish force that had landed nearby. The Flemish were said to have burned everything in their path, houses and churches alike, and any castle near Baarland may not have sur...

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Image: J.P. de Koning | CC BY-SA 4.0

Baarland Castle: Through Burgundian Hands

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit J.P. de Koning, CC BY-SA 4.0. Anna van Borselen, eldest daughter of Wolfert VI, married Philip of Burgundy-Beveren around 1485, and the castle passed to their son Adolf of Burgundy, Admiral of the Netherlands. Adolf left Veere - and his castles - heavily in debt when he died in 1540. His bastard son Philippe ...

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Image: J.P. de Koning | CC BY-SA 4.0

Baarland Castle: Demolition by Auction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kasteelbeer, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. In September 1840 the demolition was already in progress, the contents advertised in the Middelburgsche courant: marble fireplaces, windows, leather wall-paper, floor tiles, all for sale. Cornelis Adrianus van Bol'es and Jacobus de Backer of Rotterdam, the owners, sold the bare s...

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Image: Kasteelbeer | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Baarland Castle: The Feenstras

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerard Dukker, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the Feenstras started work in 1965, they drained the moat, leveled the old wall foundations, and built timber forms to pour new concrete - the part that went wrong at first. Mrs. Feenstra did the leveling. They re-used the original soft local brick to face the new walls, so ...

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Image: Gerard Dukker | CC BY-SA 4.0