Denmark in the 1530s and 1540s had given its nobility every reason to be nervous. The Count's Feud — Grevens Fejde — was a war of succession that turned into a civil war, and it ran straight into the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. Noblemen responded by building homes that were also fortifications, and Egeskov is the purest surviving example. It consists of two long houses joined by a double wall more than a metre thick, an arrangement with one specific purpose: if attackers took one house, the defenders abandoned it and kept fighting from the other. Two round corner towers let them rake the flanks of anyone at the walls. Then come the details — artillery ports, arrow slits, and scalding holes for pouring something unpleasant onto whoever reached the base of the building.

That thick central wall is not solid. Concealed staircases run inside it, and so does a water well, reachable from the servants' kitchen in the east house — the point being that a garrison cut off from the lake still had something to drink. The brickwork is the oversized medieval type sometimes called monk's brick, and the conical tower roofs are built up from a series of separate panels. Windows are depressed and round-arched, gables carry round-arched blank arcading, and a double string course marks the line between the high cellar and the ground floor. Egeskov also holds some of the earliest indoor plumbing attempted in Europe: vertical shafts, built into the fabric, for carrying waste away. The exterior reads as Late Gothic; step inside, and the original interiors are already speaking Renaissance.

Among the contents is a massive iron chest dating from at least the 16th century, brought here from Hvedholm Castle, an estate about twenty kilometres west that once belonged to Egeskov. The walls carry a great many oil paintings, and the one that dominates the great hall on the first floor is a portrait of Niels Juel — the admiral who broke the Swedish fleet at the Battle of Køge Bay in 1677. Several of the large rooms are spanned by massive parallel exposed beams, some of them carved at the ends. The house is not a museum reconstruction of itself. Most of it is open to the public, but part remains the private residence of Count Michael Ahlefeldt-Laurvig-Bille, whose family has held the estate since 1882.

The park around the castle covers 20 hectares and has been divided, over the centuries, into a collection of quite different gardens. The Renaissance garden has fountains, gravel and clipped topiary. The fuchsia garden — one of the largest in Europe — holds 104 species. There is an English garden, a water garden, a herb garden, a kitchen garden and a bondehave, the traditional Danish peasant's garden. Four hedge mazes stand in the grounds. The oldest is beech, several hundred years old, and it has to be cut back every single year or the trees will die. The newest is bamboo, the largest bamboo maze in the world, with a Chinese tower at its centre and a bridge from the tower serving as the way out. Somewhere among all this is a three-metre sundial designed by Piet Hein, the Danish poet and mathematician, which is about as Danish a garden ornament as can be imagined.

The estate runs to a further eight square kilometres, two and a half of them forest and the rest farmland, and a good part of it has been given over to collections that have nothing to do with the 16th century. Egeskov houses vintage automobiles, vintage motorcycles, aircraft and helicopters, a history of agriculture, and the vehicles of Falck — the Danish rescue company — including fire engines, ambulances and rescue boats. Three large modern buildings hold most of it; the agricultural museum and horse wagons are in Ladegården, a thatched half-timbered building that was once part of the working farm. There are playgrounds for children scattered through the park. The strangest offshoot sits on the other side of the world: in 1986, with the permission of Count Claus and Countess Louisa Ahlefeldt-Laurvig-Bille, a full-sized replica of Egeskov was built on Hokkaidō in Japan — to hold an aquarium.