Het Oude Hof in Bergen: a country estate from 1643, park free to enter

A country estate from 1643, a kilometre from the centre of Bergen, that you can simply walk through. Het Oude Hof is listed as a complex in the national monuments register under number 512268, with the main building and the historic garden and park layout as separate elements. The land belongs to the municipality of Bergen. The house itself is not a museum.

Can you just walk into the park of Het Oude Hof?

Yes. Both the tourist office site bezoek-bergen.nl and noordhollandseduinen.nl write that the park and the outer wood, the Bergerbos, are freely accessible. There is no ticket and no gate you have to pass.

Two things we could not pin down. Whether opening hours apply, from sunrise to sunset for instance, does appear on noordhollandseduinen.nl, but there it concerns the Bergerbos of PWN, the water company that manages much of the dune area, and that is not the same site as the municipality’s estate. And exactly where the boundary between those two runs, we have not established. In the Noordhollands Duinreservaat of PWN you do need a dune pass. On the estate, municipal land, we know of no pass requirement.

What is there to see on the estate?

Water, banks and three islands. The southern, square part of the estate consists of three artificially dug islands in a moat. The house stands on the middle one; on the eastern one the kitchen garden is still there, with a seventeenth-century serpentine wall, an eighteenth-century gardener’s house and a nineteenth-century glasshouse. The orchard used to lie on the western island, and that is gone.

In the north-west and north-east corners lie artificial hills thrown up as panorama points, the kattebergen. Those are still there. Along the Eeuwigelaan, the Sparrenlaan and every main avenue except the Sluislaan run earthen ornamental banks with ditches beside them: the soil for the banks came out of those ditches. East of the Roodeweg are the remains of an ice house, recognisable as a bump in the landscape. On the forecourt stand two lime trees from the earliest phase of the layout.

This description comes from the Landgoed ’t Oude Hof zoning plan of the municipality of Bergen, dated 23 October 2018, and from the register description of the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, the Dutch cultural heritage agency. That plan is now eight years old. What it says about vegetation and maintenance may be out of date, the structure itself is not.

How many hectares the estate covers we have not been able to establish. None of the sources we consulted names an area, so no figure stands here. What we can say: the square southern part drawn in OpenStreetMap as Landgoed Het Oude Hof measures roughly 400 by 420 metres, and above it the estate continues in the rectangular northern part towards the foot of the dunes.

Why do the avenues lie in such a strict pattern?

Because the layout was calculated on music. The register description of the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed says the estate was laid out according to a seventeenth-century classicist system of proportions based on musical ratios, described in that register as a seventh chord, 15:6:5:4. Its founder, Anthonis Studler van Surck, corresponded about it with the philosopher René Descartes.

That is not an anecdote from a guided tour, it is in the official national monuments register. What you see on the ground, those dead straight sight lines with the cross avenues at right angles to them, has therefore literally been worked out.

Is the original manor house still there?

No, and it never stood there either. The plan was a corps de logis at the head of the forecourt with two service wings beside it. Those two wings were finished in 1660, the main building itself was never built. Around 1830 the western house was demolished.

What you see now is the eastern service wing, rebuilt in the nineteenth century into the neoclassical building of today. The rebuilding is dated to 1852, after Van Reenen bought the manorial rights of Bergen in 1851. The sources do not agree on his first names: ONH, the regional heritage platform Oneindig Noord-Holland, calls him both mr. Jan Jacob and Jan Jacobus Henricus van Reenen, blooming writes Jacobus Henricus. So we leave the first name out.

Who owns Het Oude Hof?

The municipality of Bergen. That is the only point in the ownership history all sources agree on, and the 2018 zoning plan confirms it: the estate stands on land owned by the municipality. Use of the buildings runs through a long lease.

When the municipality became the owner we cannot establish. The Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed and ONH hold to 1955, another ONH article writes 1952, and blooming itself names 1962 with a long lease running to 2062. Three sources, three years. We pick none of them.

Can you see the main building from the inside?

Only as a visitor to what is in it. The main building is not a museum and has no free entry. After the war the house was used by the Volkshogeschool, a residential adult education college, and it is now operated by blooming, with restaurant Het Hof inside. In OpenStreetMap the building is accordingly listed with operator blooming and the website weareblooming.com.

Opening hours and prices of that restaurant are not given here: they change, and the only source that counts is hethof.com. Elsewhere on the estate is the film house de Zwarte Schuur, a former barn now serving as a cinema, plus a farm used as offices and a scouting ground.

Where can you park?

By the manor house there are a few spaces on the Roodeweg, reached from the Eeuwigelaan. What is there in the way of signs, tariff or time window we have not checked at the source, so we name no amount.

We do know that parking here has been the sticking point for years. The 2018 zoning plan established that the supply was insufficient and that cars were standing crosswise in the Kijklaan, straight across a historic sight line. The solution in that plan was one central car park of 85 spaces by the scouting ground, against a calculated need of 91 spaces on a Friday evening. Whether that car park is there by now we have not verified. Come by bicycle or on foot if you can: from the centre of Bergen it is 0.98 kilometres as the crow flies.

Can the dog come?

For the Bergerbos next door, noordhollandseduinen.nl says a lead requirement applies from 15 March to 15 June inclusive, the breeding season. Outside that period he may run free there.

For the estate itself we could find no dog regulation of the municipality of Bergen. So do not simply carry the Bergerbos rule across, that is a different site with a different manager. Read the signs at the entrance.