Doorwerth Castle

The first castle at Doorwerth, probably built of wood, enters the record in 1260 in the worst possible way: it was besieged and burned to the ground by the lord of Vianen — probably a punishment ordered by the Count of Gelre to put an end to the robber practices of the castle's lord, Berend van Dorenweerd. Over the following twenty years Berend, or his son Hendric, rebuilt in stone. That second castle was besieged in its turn in 1280, when the bailey was burned down. It was probably a simple hall-keep of two storeys, roughly ten by fifteen metres, with walls 1.2 metres thick and a surrounding moat fed by the nearby Rhine — a footprint still recognisable in the present east wing.

The castle was enlarged continually through the 14th century as the property of the Van Dorenweerd family. In 1402 Robert van Dorenweerd dedicated it to Reinald IV, Count of Gelre, and received castle and land back in fief. In 1435 it passed to the knight Reinald van Homoet, 10th Lord of Dorenweerd and owner of Doornenburg Castle, whose building accounts of 1435–36 speak of extensive works. The massive residential tower on the north wing, with its corner turrets, is attributed to him on the strength of those accounts; he certainly enlarged the south wing and moved the main entrance, and the outer bailey too was first laid out in the 15th century.

Doorwerth reached its largest form just after the middle of the 16th century under Adam Schellaert van Obbendorf, 15th Lord of Dorenweerd, and Walrave van Voorst, lady of Doorwerth, whose rebuilding of 1560 drew castle and bailey buildings into a single whole, adjusted for space and comfort. By then the castle had almost reached its present appearance. Around 1637 the bailey was rebuilt and a dike thrown around the castle against Rhine floods, and in 1640 Adam's great-grandson Johan Vincent van Schellaert van Obbendorf added the gatehouse.

Financial troubles soon forced a change of hands, and the castle was granted in fief to a German count, Anton I van Aldenburg. It survived the Dutch "disaster year" of 1672 intact — a survival credited to Van Aldenburg's family ties to the King of Denmark, an ally of France. His successors altered nothing, contenting themselves with acquiring more land, and rarely lived there; by the end of the 18th century the castle stood uninhabited, kept by a steward for owners who now lived in England.

The neglected castle was bought in 1837 by baron Jacob Adriaan Prosper van Brakell, who restored and thoroughly modernised it and took up residence. The revival did not long outlast him — he died in 1844, and decay set in once more.

In 1908 the castle was bought by Willem Scheffer, who wanted the river meadows for his model farm and had no interest in restoring the building itself. Rescue came through the retired artillery officer Frederic Adolph Hoefer, on whose initiative the association De Doorwerth was founded in 1909; a year later it secured the castle, restored it between 1910 and 1915, and after 1913 it housed Hoefer's Dutch Artillery Museum — a collection later continued in Delft as the Army Museum and merged in 2013 into the National Military Museum at Soesterberg.

In 1944 the castle suffered heavily from German destructiveness and Allied shelling. The restoration that followed ran until 1983, returning Doorwerth to its 18th-century state under the Friends of the Castles of Gelderland foundation, which maintains it as a museum. The war has been slow to leave the ground: in October 2019 bomb-disposal teams recovered 121 hand grenades from around the castle after archery-contest participants stumbled on a few of them.