Qualla: Twickel Castle

Twickel Castle: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. In 1953, a baroness in her seventies made a decision few of her peers ever made: she gave it all away. Twickel had been in the family for centuries, an estate of woods, farms, gardens, hunting lodges, an orangery, and a 16th-century moated castle at the centre. Marie Amelie baroness van Heeckeren van Wassenaer signed the lot over to a new foundation, with one condition. After her death, the castle had to stay lived in. No museum freeze, no roped-off rooms. Someone, ideally a relative, had to keep waking up in it.

Read more: Twickel Castle on Qualla

Image: Public domain

Twickel Castle: The First Eysinck

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yhoitink, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. Twickel begins in 1347, when a man named Herman van Twickelo bought a house called Eysinck near the small town of Delden, in what is now Overijssel. The family that took its name from the place stayed for two centuries. Then came the Van Raesfelts, then the Van Wassenaer Obdams, ...

Read more: Twickel Castle on Qualla

Image: Yhoitink | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Twickel Castle: Gardens Built in Layers

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Loek Tangel, CC BY-SA 4.0. If the castle is a palimpsest, the gardens are an archive. The earliest known layout, from the mid-1600s, was a formal geometric parterre with trellised tunnels and orchards held inside an outer moat. Then an early-18th-century baroque garden rose behind the castle, with ponds an...

Read more: Twickel Castle on Qualla

Image: Loek Tangel | CC BY-SA 4.0

Twickel Castle: The Condition of Inhabitance

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mwvandam, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl. The baroness's foundation was unusual in 1953 and would be unusual now. Most great Dutch country houses passed to museums, the state, or were quietly subdivided and sold. Twickel went into a single legal entity charged with preserving it as both nature reserve and cultural monume...

Read more: Twickel Castle on Qualla

Image: Mwvandam | CC BY-SA 3.0 nl

Twickel Castle: An Estate You Can Walk

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0. Twickel's land runs to thousands of hectares of forest, farmland, and water around the castle, making it the largest privately held estate in the Netherlands. You can recognize the farms that belong to it by the shutters, white with black edges. Some of the products grown on thos...

Read more: Twickel Castle on Qualla

Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 3.0