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.

Ruthven Barracks

Apologies for the extremely long gap since my last post.  Things have been very busy at work (coupled with a slight drop in wargaming mojo - I must have been overdoing it) with a few trips out of the country: Bucharest, Istanbul, Corfu (that one was a holiday) and Hull, to name but a few.  FYI, I'm currently in Ankara stuck in a hotel so thought I'd do some catching up.

Mind you, over the summer I did get to travel about my own native land (i.e. Scotland) and, on the theme of eighteenth century wafare (not much progressed since my reviews of Szabo and others, see earlier post), I thought that Ruthven Barracks would be worth a look.

The site is a prominent fluvial mound in Badenoch and Strathspey, close to Kingussie (on the way to Aviemore) surrounded by boggy ground in the flood plain of the River Spey.  The mound is very steep all round and there was formerly a medieval castle on the site owned by various characters from Scottish history such as the Comyns and the Stewarts (e.g. the "Wolf of Badenoch").  It changed hands a few times though before eventually being beseiged and destroyed by Claverhouse in 1689.

Following the 1715 Jacobite rebellion the barracks were built in 1719-1721 (see this paper (pdf) for background and archaeology) to a design used at a number of other sites in the Highlands.  Stables were subsequently added.  The barracks were intended for use as a base for a small garrison tasked with patrolling this important route north (subsequently one of General Wade's military roads and now the A9, and still important).

However, it only saw action twice and that was when Jacobite forces half-heartedly attacked it in 1745 and then captured it in 1746.

Nevertheless, it's worth a visit mainly because it gives a good idea of stone built defensive architecture in 'frontier' locations from that period, and it's therefore useful for getting ideas for making buildings and other wargames table furniture.

And of course it's beautiful up there (sometimes).  For example, have a look at this shot I took the next day (on my iPhone) at Loch Garten near the RSPB Boat of Garten Osprey centre (I've not seen it like that very often!).

Look out for more travel-related and barely tangential to wargaming type posts coming soon!