Hammerstein Castle (Apelern)
The Castle of Hammerstein is a palace complex in the Lower Saxony municipality Apelern .
history
The Apelern estate, already mentioned in 1055, had a checkered history of ownership before the estate passed into the possession of Baron Jobst von Münchhausen around 1550 as a fiefdom of the Counts of Holstein-Schaumburg . After this Münchhausen line had died out (another one still owns the neighboring moated castle Münchhausen in Apelern), on March 1, 1580, the Chancellor Anton Wietersheim acquired the property in Apelern, which had been converted into a Freihof in 1556 by Count Otto IV von Holstein-Schaumburg the Chancellor gradually increased in area. The one-wing castle from 1590, which rises above a rectangular, elongated floor plan on the northern edge of the castle island in an east-west orientation, follows the type of a four-story building with a gable roof, which is accessed through a polygonal spiral staircase tower in front of the structure.
On June 30, 1673, the Royal Swedish Major General Friderich Christoph von Hammerstein-Gesmold acquired the manor and castle. Friderich Christoph came from the family of the Barons von Hammerstein , first mentioned in tournament books on November 5, 948 , who now live in the castle in the 12th generation. Ancestral seat of the family was an imperial castle, devastated by French troops in 1688 and only preserved as a ruin since then, which sits enthroned on a rock above the Rhine opposite Andernach.
The garden adjoining the castle island to the south was - like today - divided into several garden rooms separated by rows of trees and hornbeam hedges. The restoration of the garden spaces in 2004 was based on historical garden plans and inventories. In particular, the garden plans of the royal Hanoverian court and chamberlain Börries Friederich Karl von Hammerstein were used for the restoration. On his travels, he had visited the gardens of the English royal palaces and between 1805 and 1806, in addition to the already existing kitchen, fruit and pleasure gardens, he built an English garden under the direction of the Hessian court gardener Homburg in Apelern. Today's palace garden contains u. a. Trees over 200 years old, a 150 m long avenue of lime trees from 1918 and 5,400 perennials that transform the castle garden into a sea of flowers from spring to autumn. Further restorations are planned, for example a 36 m long water basin with fountains was restored in 2009 based on garden plans from 1767 and a maze was created in 2011.
description
Hammerstein Castle is characterized in particular by the late-Gothic architectural impression of the exterior in connection with the interior portals adorned with columns and the chimneys in the interior of the castle decorated with ancient and northern European motifs. Hammerstein Castle is an expression of a conscious and, in this form, unique combination of Gothic and ancient reception with the humanistic worldview of the early modern period in the Grafschaft Schaumburg.
literature
- Lutz Dursthoff: The German castles and palaces in color. Krüger, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-8105-0228-6 , p. 524.
Web links
- Site of the Hammerstein Castle
- Hammerstein Castle near the World of Arms: Description and photos, focus on heraldry
Coordinates: 52 ° 17 ′ 31 ″ N , 9 ° 20 ′ 14 ″ E