Monday, 9 June 2008
Chateau M
« One wonders... | Main | Nifty app: Nocturne »Another weekend, another location that needs to be visited. This time, we went to an abandoned (duh :) castle somewhere in Belgium.
We had gotten a tip from fellow urbexers, and decided to check it out. As far as I know, no one had visited that place before. Finding the castle wasn't hard, since you could see it from the main road, but that didn't mean it was easy to get in. Since the only "official" entrance to the domain around the castle passed right along some villas, which had clear signs of activity, we decided to look for another way.
I had spotted another road on the GPS that led to the other side of the domain. Unfortunately, it was only a very muddy dirt road, used by local farmers. After a while, we found ourselves walking along the forest of the domain, spotted a weak part in the fence around it, which we could jump :)
But as it turned out, that was only the easy part: there were no real paths on the domain. So we had to walk a few hundred meters in shoulder-height nettles, while we tried to make our own path while guessing what the direction towards the castle was. Fortunately for me, I was wearing long trousers (experience tells me that this is a wise thing to do while urbexing), but unfortunately, I was only wearing a simple T-shirt. So I ended up with having itchy arms for the rest of the day :).
Progress was slow, we weren't absolutely sure we were going in the right direction, but in the end, we could spot the castle. What we saw was already worth it: a beautiful green pasture, filled with sheep, that were grazing along the pond that is located around the castle.
We took some shots from the outside, while at the same time trying to see if we could spot an entrance. It didn't look to good, all windows and doors were barricaded. But on the other side of the castle, we did spot an entrance that seemed to lead into the basement. When we entered, it became clear that the basement was used as a stable for the sheep. We found a door that lead upstairs, and so we entered the ground floor (pretty much the only floor of three that was still not collapsed).
In there we found stacks of hay, a stairwell without stairs, lots of animal cages and lots of remains of the top floors :). It was there I took this shot:
It's a shame that the rest (what was left of it after more than 50 years of abandonment) of the castle was in such a bad shape, so we only spent time on ground floor. But it sure was all worth it.
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Posted by at 7:39 PM in Photography

very nice photos. i wanted to see if i could get a high res of your picture "foot of the koppenberg"