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Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The castle of Barly, often mistakenly called Château de Varlemont, was built around 1780 in the Pas-de-Calais, at the initiative of Vindicien Antoine Blin and his wife Marie Pétronille de Beauvoir de Séricourt. This wrong name comes from the surname of their son, Jean Vindicien Blin de Varlemont, owner at the completion of the works. The Blin family, though bourgeois and affluent, was never anoblated, and the castle remains locally known as the castle of Barly.

Construction began after the legacy of Jean-Marie Blin, captain of infantry who died in 1775 in his seigneurial house. His son, Vindicien Antoine, and his second wife launched the project, but died in 1786 before its completion. Jean Vindicien Blin de Varlemont, their son, then inherited the estate. Mayor of Barly in 1790, he was placed under house arrest during the Terror, then rented the castle to the bishop of Arras between 1812 and 1818.

The castle changed hands several times in the 19th century: sold in 1837 to the Countess of Tramecourt, he then moved to the Marquis du Luart, then to Arthur Duhem in 1914. Requisitioned during the two world wars, he was saved from the ruin in 1970 by Colonel Jacques d'Antin de Vaillac, who obtained his classification at the Historic Monuments in 1971. The interiors, decorated with woodwork by the sculptor Caesar Auguste Lepage (1784–87), and the neoclassical ensemble (chapel, commons, dairy) are now open to the public in summer.

Architecturally, the castle illustrates the neoclassical style of the late eighteenth century, with a housing body extended by agricultural outbuildings (pigeons, d ́amour dairy). Its staircase of Artois and its interior decorations, classified, make it a rare testimony of the aristocratic rural heritage of Artois. Since 2001, the current owners, Bernard Dragesco and Didier Cramoisan, have continued their restoration and summer opening.

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