Qualla: Moyland Castle

Moyland Castle: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jacob Enos, CC BY 2.0. At the foot of the staircase that leads up to Moyland Castle's main door, a small bronze pug sits on the railing. On the opposite side, a wolf. The pug is Winston Churchill. The wolf is Voltaire. They are not the kind of statues one expects on a German country castle, and the choice is deliberate: this moated water castle, surrounded by black water and red brick towers in the Lower Rhine country near Kleve, has hosted both a Prussian king's philosopher and a British prime minister watching his army cross the Rhine. The pug stands at the lower end of the railing - small, stout, and quietly representing a man who, for a few days in March 1945, made Moyland the watchtower of an empire at war.

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Image: Jacob Enos | CC BY 2.0

Moyland Castle: Mooiland

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ignati, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. The name itself is a small joke from Dutch workmen. In 1307, a leaseholder named Jacob van den Eger brought a crew of Dutch laborers to drain the wetlands around a fortified farm in the Lower Rhine. They looked at the wet, flat, beautiful land they were standing in and called it ...

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Image: Ignati | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Moyland Castle: Frederick and Voltaire's Truth Factory

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit [Rheinpfeil], CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1740 the Prussian King Frederick II - Frederick the Great - met the French philosopher Voltaire at Moyland during one of his many stays. The two men were already in a long correspondence about everything from poetry to politics, and they spent days at the castle dreaming up so...

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Image: [Rheinpfeil] | CC BY-SA 3.0

Moyland Castle: Churchill at the Rhine

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DennisPeeters, Public domain. Two centuries later, the war that ended European empires brought another statesman to Moyland. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery took the castle as his headquarters during Operation Plunder, the British and Canadian crossing of the Rhine in late March 1945. Winston Churchill came ...

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Image: DennisPeeters | Public domain

Moyland Castle: The Beuys Collection

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photograph: Sir Gawain, CC BY-SA 3.0. For thirty years after the war, Moyland sat in slow decay. The roof leaked. A 1956 fire in the western roof truss made things worse. The owner, Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland - who had served as state secretary to Hitler's foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and had bee...

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Image: Photograph: Sir Gawain | CC BY-SA 3.0

Moyland Castle: The Park and the Sculptures

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Raimond Spekking, CC BY-SA 4.0. The grounds around Moyland make the castle work. Restored in the mid-1990s to reflect their late-nineteenth-century appearance, the park combines English landscape garden softness with the geometry of a baroque architectural garden, and it carries the marks of two centuries of de...

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Image: Raimond Spekking | CC BY-SA 4.0