The castle of Kessel, called Keverberg. Alde garde on tour

Near were we live, the castle of Kessel was restored two years ago. Although restoring took place in a modern way, we do like it and the restoration combine the older part of the castle with new, modern touches and is a now multifunctional building.

The castle is probably founded on a old Roman watchtower. Later appeared a wooden tower which was changed into a stone keep in the late 11th century, see drawing
In the 13th century the hill was steepened into a real motte and a stone ciruclar wall was built. so it looked like this:

                    

In the following centuries the castle grows (see drawing), until it looked like this in 1739:

The castle had many functions but ended as a school for girls before WW2. 

But then, the war came in 1944 to Kessel and the retreating German army blew up the castle so it couldn't be used by the allied troops. It looked like this for years:

  

Various plans were made after the war for restoring the castle but, as always, the problem was money and it was decided to partially restoring the castle but then in a modern way; combining old with new into a multifunctional building.

the ruine

It now look like this; maybe not to everybodies liking:

  the new style

Some more pictures will appear on our site in "Alde Garde on Tour"

Crisis 2016: a great TSoA event again

As each year the Alde Garde visited the Crisis show with a demo.
This year an older demo with additions or a version 2 if you want.

The show is always a great pleasure te visit; seeing old friends, visit various traders  (and spending money), and talking to the same minded wargamers. Crisis 2017; here we come.
And of course a great thanks to all the members of TSoA; they do a great job, year after year.

This year they also baked and baked with great enthousiasm whole mountains of sausages and hamburgers (along with thousands of other things) which turned hal 1 in light blue clouds and bakery smells; we are a little bit glad our demo table was in hal 2.

Some pictures we took of all the great games and demos going on; sadly we had only very litttle time to take pictures. So our excuses to clubs of which we haven't any pictures.
Of course we end with pictures of our demo.

Hope to see you next year at Crisis!

 

And some pictures of our demo:

Building department busy for Crisis

The Alde garde building department aka Peter is perparing new terrain for Crisis.
As we are needing new terrain pieces we used the walls/tower of the old village of Arcen in the Netherlands as an example to build.
The first impression is underneath.

Crisis 2016

As we already said earlier, our planned demo of the War of the Austrian Succession is cancelled as we both (yes, the whole Alde Garde is just two) had too many bussiness and private commitments to finish it.
So now we plan  to take an upgraded early 1500 demo with us.
Hopefully we see you at Crisis.

Warcon Ghent 2017

We saw the sad news that the Warcon 28 Wargames show in Ghent is cancelled. We don't know the reasons as anly a small snippet of news was published on their Facebook site.
It's a pity as last year was a nice day; organised by a new team in a new venue but I suppose they have their reasons.
All the luck to them for 2018 of course.

Open day of the NSM and the cavalry museum

On the 24th of September we participated with our 1692 demo in the joined open day of the Dutch Society for Modelfigures (Nederlandse Stichting voor Modelfiguren or NSM) and the Dutch Cavalry Museum, both at the Bernhard Barracks in Amersfoort, Netherlands.

Almost 1000 visitors were counted who visited the stand of the NSM, an RC club with various scaled modeltanks who often circelled around us, the cavalry museum and ride on the real things, the tanks which were used by the Dutch armoured cavalry in past years.
I suppose for most visitors this was the best part of the day but a lot of them found their way to our table and were were all day busy explaining why wargaming is such a great hobby.


Maybe of interest to you the sites of the NSM and of the cavalry museum are:

NSM:  http://www.modelfiguren.nl

Cavalry museum:  http://www.cavaleriemuseum.nl/

underneath are some pictures but most of them are on our site.