Burned by an army, rebuilt like a palace
Transcript
Middachten looks calm and elegant, sitting in its moat. It was built that way on purpose, after the previous castle was destroyed by a retreating army.
There has been a castle on this spot since at least 1190, when it belonged to a man named Jacobus de Mithdac, from whom the name comes. For centuries it was a fortified house on the edge of the Veluwe.
Then came the war of 1672 and 1673. When the French were driven back after the Dutch stadtholder William the Third captured Bonn, their troops destroyed the castle on the way out.
The new owners, Godard van Ginkel and his wife Ursula van Raesfelt, rebuilt it between 1693 and 1698. They wanted it to look like the most fashionable house of the day: Het Loo, the new palace of William the Third, just up the road near Apeldoorn. The architects Jacobus Roman and Steven Vennecool gave them exactly that.
The gardens followed the fashions too: first a formal garden inspired by Versailles, then an English landscape park in the late eighteenth century, and around 1900 a partial return to the original style, made by the garden designer Hugo Poortman for the Bentinck family.
Middachten is now a national monument and counts among the top one hundred heritage sites of the Netherlands. At Christmas it opens its doors, so you get to see the inside of a house that was built to impress, more than three hundred years ago.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
