Rydboholm Castle

The name Ryd is prehistoric and is cut on a runestone near the estate; Iron Age grave fields north of the castle can be associated with the Viking-age villages that stood here before the castle era. The building known as the Gammelgården was probably raised in timber in the first half of the fifteenth century and became a sätesgård, a noble seat farm; written sources of 1436 name rydbo holm several times. The first known owner was the councillor of the realm Gustav Anundsson Sture. From the fifteenth century Rydboholm belonged to the elder Sture family, passing by marriage to the Vasas and later to the Brahes.

Whether Gustav Vasa was born at Rydboholm has never been settled — Lindholmen in Orkesta parish is the other candidate — but it is confirmed that he spent much of his youth on the estate. A document of 1521 names Göstaff Erichson i Ribboholm, and in 1523 he wrote himself of Rydboholm. From 1520 the property belonged to his sister, Margareta Eriksdotter Vasa.

A tradition going back to the middle of the nineteenth century placed Gustav Vasa's study in the free-standing tower that carries his name, and the tower was long taken for fifteenth-century work. A building-archaeology investigation begun in 1982 dated its original roof beams by dendrochronology to timber felled in the winter of 1547–48, after Gustav had become king; the tower went up alongside the main house. It was built as a defence tower ringed by water, probably taller than it now stands, with a firing gallery at the top.

It was probably Per Brahe the elder who raised the stone house — the main building with its west wing — begun in 1548. A portal stone set into it carries his name, his arms, that year and the words herr Per Brahe til Rydboholm. His son Abraham Brahe added a tower, since vanished, in the inner angle between house and wing; in 1596 it was recorded as having been raised by two further rooms. The work was directed by the master builder Bertil Link, who was also employed on the castle of Tre Kronor. Per Brahe the younger was born at Rydboholm in 1602.

Erik Dahlbergh's engraving Ridboholm of 1662, made for the Suecia, shows a heavy Renaissance building of ornamented gables and tower caps, dominated by the tall lantern-crowned corner tower of Abraham Brahe's time, the yard walled and protected by moats. Ships lie outside it, at anchor in the roadstead or moored at the estate's own jetty. The sea was the natural approach to Rydboholm.

Early in the eighteenth century fire took the Renaissance complex, sparing the Vasa tower. Brahe's tower was demolished and an east wing built instead, giving the castle its present arrangement of three ranges in a U around a courtyard open to the south; the Vasa tower's weathervane bears the year 1746. At the end of the same century the owner, Magnus Fredrik Brahe, laid out a large English garden west of the house, furnished in the taste of the day with obelisks, memorial stones and a green-painted summerhouse shaped like a barrel, Diogenes' tub. One of the two oaks Gustav Vasa is said to have planted there still stands, as do four set by Karl XIV Johan in 1834.

The Brahes held Rydboholm, apart from the years 1756 to 1761, until the family died out in 1930 with Count Magnus Per Brahe (1849–1930). Their burial chapel in Östra Ryd church was closed for good and its key sunk with ceremony in the neighbouring Kyrkfjärden by Archbishop Nathan Söderblom, assisted by King Gustaf V. By the count's will the estate passed to his sister's son, Baron Wilhelm von Essen. Rydboholm was long the largest seat farm in the Stockholm district, with more than forty tenant farms.

The Vasa tower has been a protected building monument since 8 February 1988, and the castle, the park and the surrounding manorial landscape of fields, avenues and tenant farms are of national interest for cultural heritage, as a record of how Sweden's foremost noble families lived from the close of the Middle Ages onward.

The estate runs to 2,864 hectares, 2,054 of them forest, and was assessed in 2004 at 60 million kronor; part of the land is let to a golf course and a marina. It remains in private hands, lived in by Countess Elisabeth Douglas, born von Essen, widow of the financier Count Gustaf Douglas, with the family running Rydboholm as it does Stjärnorp. The English park is open to the public while the castle grounds are fenced and private. In 2017 work was in progress there to reconstruct the old moat, fed by a canal drawing water from the Kyrkviken.