Qualla: Oud Herlaer

Oud Herlaer: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter van der Wielen, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. Stand at Oud Herlaer today and you are standing on a small artificial hill. Three metres of sand and clay above the natural ground, deliberately heaped, then a brick farm sitting on top. Underneath are the foundations of a motte-and-bailey castle that probably went up in the eleventh century, and the ring wall of a stone castle that replaced it around 1250. The Lords of Herlaer ran a tidy operation from this spot - tolls on river traffic, peat from the wet meadows, and thousands of barge loads of sand sold off to expand the medieval city centre of 's-Hertogenbosch. Then in 1737 the castle was pulled down. The hill stayed.

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Image: Peter van der Wielen | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Oud Herlaer: Why Build Here

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andries Schoemaker / Gerrit Schoemaker / Cornelis Pronk / Abraham de Haen, Public domain. Oud Herlaer was within a kilometre of Maurick Castle in Vught, almost close enough to wave from one to the other, and yet the two belonged to different jurisdictions. The reason was the Dommel. In medieval Brabant the river and its tributaries were practically the only way to mov...

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Image: Andries Schoemaker / Gerrit Schoemaker / Cornelis Pronk / Abraham de Haen | Public domain

Oud Herlaer: The Van Herlaers Move On

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter van der Wielen, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. The family that gave the place its name first appears in the records around 1080, in the early years of the medieval custom of naming nobles after their estates. The title "Lord of Herlaer" is attested in 1173. About ten generations of Van Herlaers can be traced. In the mid-twelf...

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Image: Peter van der Wielen | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Oud Herlaer: The Strange Quiet of 1629

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter van der Wielen, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. Oud Herlaer should have been wrecked many times over. It was a defensible point uncomfortably close to 's-Hertogenbosch. It could have been used by the city's defenders to delay a siege, or knocked down by besiegers after a failure. Somehow it stayed standing. During the great 16...

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Image: Peter van der Wielen | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Oud Herlaer: Demolition and a Farm Made of Castle

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter van der Wielen, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. By the eighteenth century the great families who held the title - the De la Tour d'Auvergnes, then the Electors of the Palatinate and Bavaria - had bigger estates elsewhere and almost never visited. In 1737 the castle was demolished. By the 1760s a farm had appeared on the site, ...

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Image: Peter van der Wielen | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Oud Herlaer: Excavation, Restoration, and a New Idea

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter van der Wielen, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. In 2015 the Groen Ontwikkelfonds Brabant bought the farm with an eye to restoring the natural connections of the Dommel valley. The modern stables came down. Archaeologists from BAAC walked the terrain in 2016, mapped what was left, and in 2017 the moat was re-excavated, putting ...

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Image: Peter van der Wielen | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl