Chateau de Chevron

Stoumont, Belgium, Belgium

---

“Chevron” (also spelled Kevuruns) appears from the 12th century, when the domain belonged to the Abbey of Stavelot, and for centuries it formed an hereditary mayoralty (mayeurie) with its own court of justice inside a fortified manor house or “maison forte,” which was an early small castle and residence of the hereditary mayors and stood near the village church and cemetery, close to the current Château de Chevron in the hamlet of Chevron, a part of Stoumont in Liège province, Wallonia, Belgium.

This original fortified house was the place where important local announcements were read to the inhabitants in the castle courtyard and where, in the 17th century, women accused of sorcery were tried and sentenced, with punishments such as strangling, burning, or hanging carried out at the nearby place called “à Pindoû” above the farm of Neuville, before the old maison forte was demolished in 1865 to make way for a new residence.

The present Château de Chevron is a late-19th-century castle built by the comtes Van den Steen de Jehay around 1868, using materials from the demolished medieval building for its annexes, and displaying a typical aristocratic residence style of that period, with a church dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin built in Neo-Gothic style in 1875 nearby, and the whole village of Chevron situated on a hill overlooking the valley of the river Lienne, where the landscape and place names (such as the hamlet of Les Forges and the Heid des Feroux) still recall old ironworks, forges and mining activities in the valley.