For exactly 600 years to the year, the Briest line of the von Bismarck family lived on their estate in the Altmark. In 1345, Nikolaus von Bismarck received the Briest and Burgstall estates as a fief from the Margrave of Brandenburg. In 1945 the family was expropriated and expelled from their property as part of the land reform. The current manor house was built in 1624 by Christoph von Bismarck and his wife Dorothea II von derschulenburg in the swamp landscape of Tangier and Elbe on the foundations of the old moated castle. After a fire in 1839, the damaged part of the building was restored by the family in the Renaissance style. Because it was one of the few mansions that were built during the Thirty Years' War. After 1945 and a demolition prevented by monument preservation, the manor house in Briest initially housed refugees and later socially disadvantaged families until the early 1990s. The rooms inside have been remodeled accordingly. However, the building complex, consisting of an elongated main building and a right-angled wing building as well as an octagonal stair tower on the courtyard side, has retained its Renaissance appearance. And not only this, the farm complex has also been largely preserved with a brewery, barns and a small church from 1599. Like the manor house, most of the buildings are built in strong red brick framework. The spacious landscape park, which was laid out as an English landscape garden in 1849 according to plans by the horticultural director Christian Schaumburg, the designer of the Georgengarten in Hanover-Herrenhausen, is also still there - although overgrown and with a pond that has been enlarged to form a swimming lake.