Gosh, I soooo need to catch up with this thread...
Flyboy already gave some information about the gun, but I thought I should expand a little on it.
The gun has never fired. Period. Like in every town they will tell tourists some nice stories. Because of the size and weight it's used as a siege weapon to break walls, not to shoot at enemies.
The cannon was probably build in 1431 and originally located in Oudenaarde. It was most likely build by Jean Cambier, the weapon manufacturer of the Bourgundian duke Filips the Good, since the Bourgundian coat of arms can be found on top of the gun, together with the marks of The Order of The Golden Fleece (founded in 1430). In 1578 it was taken - together with all kinds of weapons - from Oudenaarde to Ghent as loot during the iconoclasm in the Netherlands.
The original wheight was somewhere around 12500kg, but it lost roughly some 250kg over the ages due to corrosion. According to calculations by the Royal Military Academy the cannon could shoot cannon balls up to 295kg.
It's called De Dulle Griet ("The Evil Woman" according to Flyboy, but "The Mad Dame" covers the meaning of the Dutch words a little better in my opinion. Because of it's color it was also called "The Red Devil".
But if Miss H wins Miss FreeOnes I'm going to start a petition in my home town Ghent to rename the canon to "The Miss Hybrid".
To know I only live 30 seconds away from this gun (if I sprint). I could have given you a salute shot. :crying:
Obviously with a smaller gun