A fortress rebuilt from a map
Transcript
Tonight Heusden is lit by candles and fires. It suits the place, because this whole fortress town was once rebuilt by looking at an old picture of it.
Heusden grew up around a castle on the river Maas, and received its city rights in 1318. During the revolt against Spain, between 1579 and 1597, it was turned into a proper fortress, with moats, bastions, walls and ravelins, to hold the river.
Then came the disasters. In July 1680 lightning struck the castle's great tower, which was being used to store gunpowder. Around sixty thousand pounds of it exploded, and the castle was gone. In the nineteenth century the old defences were neglected and taken down.
The worst night came in November 1944. With the front line on the Maas, German troops blew up the town hall tower. It collapsed onto the cellars, where townspeople were sheltering, and 134 people died. The town was liberated hours later. Please take a moment for them if you pass the town hall.
What you see now is the result of a remarkable decision. From 1968 the town rebuilt its fortifications, using a map drawn by Joan Blaeu in 1649 as its guide. The restoration won a European prize in 1980. The outline of the castle was restored in 1987.
So the walls around you are both very old and quite new: a seventeenth-century fortress, carefully redrawn from a seventeenth-century map, glowing by candlelight.
Source: en.wikipedia.org
