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Heritage classified

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Origin and history

Tilloloy Castle, located in Tilloloy near Laucourt in the Somme, is a rare example of an estate that has remained in the same family since the fourteenth century. Originally, the seigneury belonged to Jean du Fay, then passed to the Soyecourt in the sixteenth century by marriage. In the 17th century Ponthus de Belleforière became its owner. In 1636, the castle was destroyed after Corbie's surrender to the Spaniards, before being rebuilt thanks to a royal compensation obtained in 1643 by Antoine Maximilien de Belleforière, rehabilitated after his death sentence in absentia.

The reconstruction began in 1645 under the impetus of Charles-Maximilien de Belleforière, Marquis de Soyecourt and Grand Veneur de Louis XIV. The present 17th-century castle was then remodeled in 1752 by architect Étienne-Louis Boullée for Louis Armand de Seiglière, who adjusted the interiors while retaining the facade. The property passed to the Seiglières by the marriage of Marie Renée de Belleforière in 1682, then, after family dramas (including the guillotine of Joachim Charles de Seiglière in 1794), to the d'Hinnisdäl in the nineteenth century.

Destroyed during the First World War, the castle remained in ruins in 1918. Countess Thérèse d'Hinnisdal began her restoration in the 1930s, under the direction of architect Albert Montant, who reconstructed the interior and exterior decorations almost identical, using the surviving elements of the rubble. The structure was rebuilt in concrete, like that of the cathedral of Reims. When he died without an heir in 1959, the estate fell to his niece, the Marquise of Andigné, whose daughter now owns it.

The castle, classified as a historical monument in 1994 with its communes, moats and French-style park, illustrates an architecture combining brick and stone. Its forecourt of honour is bordered by the church of Notre-Dame de Lorette, an ancient castral chapel, and by buildings of outbuildings rebuilt after 1918. The park, partly in wasteland, retains a large axial driveway linking the castle to the village of Laucourt. Since 2016, he has hosted the retro-C-Trop rock festival, attracting international artists.

Tilloloy's history was marked by figures such as Étienne-Louis Boullée, who intervened there in 1752, or the Duthoit brothers, restorers of the 1880s. The glass windows of the covered courtyard, made by the Gaudin workshop in 1933, and the lion statues (large nature) bear witness to successive beautifications. The domain, although private, remains a symbol of resilience, having survived centuries of wars, revolutions and reconstructions.

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