Stone Bridges

I'm not obsessed with bridges, no, it's just that I never seem to have enough of them, of the right kinds or periods.  So over the last few years there's been the Arnhem Bridge, an ancient period bridge, a couple of wooden bridges and an ACW period 'barn bridge' variant.

WSS Danes crossing a bridge

This time, for a planned wargame, I decided that I needed a new stone bridge.  So I built two of them, one intended for 15mm and the other for 20mm, because at the time I wasn't sure whether the game would be in 15mm or 20mm.  To do this I made a cardboard template for the sides which was used for both bridges.

Standard template

Construction comprised my usual pizza base polystyrene sheeting to form the sides.  The road surfaces (about 45mm wide for the 15mm bridge and 65mm for the 20mm bridge) were made from cardboard gently curved to shape, with wooden coffee stirrers glued underneath for strength and to provide more surface area for the PVA to key with when attaching the sides.  The buttresses were made from carved balsa or polystyrene.

Pointy

The second bridge used the same template, making both bridges the same length.  I did this because I've only got one width of river I'd made previously and also I didn't want the larger scale bridge to be too long and therefore take up too much space on the table.

The only difference was that I made the 20mm bridge at the larger scale with double the thickness of polystyrene walls.  The idea for this bridge was to make a representation of an eighteenth century bridge, based in fact on Wade's bridge at Aberfeldy in Perthshire.

Wade's Bridge at Aberfeldy

Bridges like this were constructed to link various of General Wade's roads across the Scottish Highlands, intended to enable swift movement of redcoats to subdue the Highlanders and to crush any inconvenient ideas they happened to have about not wanting to continue under Hanoverian/ British rule.

Pointy and painted

Anyway, to make this model more Aberfeldy-like I added some wooden trim to the sides and sharp pylons at each corner of the parapet, made from carved balsa.  I couldn't make the pylons as ridiculously high as the ones on the original bridge because they'd just get knocked off in storage or in action. 

Italeri French crossing a bridge

Once constructed everything was undercoated in black and then painted in a dark grey and dry-brushed with white.  Neither bridge has had an outing yet, but I think it likely that a future scenario from our One Hour Wargames campaign will include at least one substantial bridge, so look out for one or other of them.