Away in the Islands, summer 2015

Introduction

So, I haven't posted anything for a while.  Relax - this isn't because I've given up blogging, but rather because I've been away for my summer holiday.  We spent 2 weeks on the island of Barra, in the Outer Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland.  It was cold and windy - the "summer" of 2015 has been dismal so far with temperatures up to 10 degrees Celsius below average for the time of year.  Still, we did a lot of walks and relaxed quite a bit.

A typically-crowded beach on Barra, on one of the better days of our visit

Apparently, it's been an excellent year for orchids.  We certainly saw huge numbers of several different sorts.  Here's one example:

So, what can I tell you about Barra that might be of interest to wargamers, model-makers or amateur historians?

Castlebay

The main settlement on Barra is Castlebay.  It's a somewhat obvious name, since the village lines the shore of a large bay - and there's a castle in the middle of the sea!  Kisimul Castle is on a rocky islet a couple of hundred metres offshore from the mainland of Barra and is the traditional seat of the MacNeill clan.  The MacNeills of Barra were famed (infamous?) as seaborne raiders; they terrorised quite a few other island and mainland communities during the Middle Ages.  Also, Barra was a hotbed of Viking activity long before that!

What you see of the castle these days is a restoration from the 1930s, so I've no idea how accurately it represents the original version.  However, one of the things that I like about it is that the interior of the castle is filled with buildings.  Too often, our wargames castles are barren, empty shells without any dwelling or utility rooms on the inside.

The well (which provided the castle with fresh water, despite its location on a rocky islet in the sea!) is in the centre in this picture, just in front of the partially-obscured door of the further building.

Dun a'Chaolais Broch

On a couple of occasions, we travelled from Barra to the adjacent island of Vatersay; there's a modern causeway linking the 2 islands so it is easy to drive from one to the other.  Near the road in the north of Vatersay, on the top of a small hill, are the remains of a probable broch.

Brochs are uniquely Scottish buildings from about 2000 years ago. found around the northern and western fringes of the country.  Originally, this structure would have been a round, dry-stone tower some 16m across and proportionally tall, with very thick walls.  The inside would have been divided into multiple small chambers.

No-one is sure how brochs were used (early theories that they were forts seem to be discouraged by modern archaeologists), but they may have been high status dwellings, watch towers or some combination of these and other factors.

Even though this site is essentially just a pile of stones with just traces of walls, it's still impressively large!

The Vatersay Catalina

Further south on Vatersay, but right beside the road, is the wreckage of an RAF Catalina flying boat that crashed on the island in 1944.  The aircraft was on a (night?) training flight out of Oban when it became lost and hit a nearby hill with the loss of several crew members.  RAF recovery teams dragged the wreckage down to the shore and took away the engines and some other parts.  The remainder of the aircraft has been left in place to this day.

There is a memorial at the site to the crew; it is well-maintained and respected (there was a wreath of poppies at the foot when we visited).  Around the highlands and islands of Scotland there are quite a few crash sites of long-range patrol aircraft, but this is by far the easiest to reach and has the most to see of any that I have encountered.

Visitors can walk right up to the pieces of wreckage; there are no barriers or warning signs.  It's quite a sobering moment, though.

Commonwealth War Grave

In the north of Barra there is the very old church of Kilbar.  This is most famous for a stone slab with early Christian symbols on one side and Viking runes on the other, possibly looted from Iona (I did say that the islanders from Barra had a reputation as raiders!)

However, something else caught my eye as well.  There's a marker at the gate to the cemetery proclaiming the presence of Commonwealth War Graves.  It turns out that there is just a single war-related grave here and it is inscribed with an Italian name.  I didn't write it down, so sadly I cannot remember it here.  I think that his first name was Enrico, though.

Further enquiries of a local historian revealed the following story: Enrico was a Jewish-Italian opera singer who happened to be in Britain when Italy entered the Second World War.  He was therefore detained and put on a ship, presumably to be deported.  However, the ship was torpedoed by German aircraft in the Bay of Biscay and sank.  Apparently bodies were washed up all along the Western Isles, including that of poor Enrico on Barra.

This version of events does raise a few questions in my mind, though:

• If the ship was torpedoed in the Bay of Biscay then how did the bodies end up far away on the west coast of Scotland?  Perhaps it didn't sink immediately and drifted for a few days?  Or maybe it was further north than I've been told in the first place?  Possibly the currents or stormy winds were strong enough at that time to move the wreckage such a distance?
• Enrico was not a member of any Commonwealth military force, so how did he end up in an official Commonwealth war grave?  My informant suggested that maybe this was because the British armed forces were responsible for collecting and burying the bodies of those killed at sea.  This is possibly correct, I suppose?  I had always assumed that Commonwealth war grave status was just for combatants, but I must be mistaken on this.

Conclusion

I've tried to avoid presenting a list of everything that we saw and did on Barra and the nearby islands.  Instead this article is edited to present just those items which (I hope!) might be of interest to the people that I imagine are my audience.

In my next post, I'll talk about the paper models I made whilst on holiday.  S.I.G!

Raising the Flag

Introduction

A little while ago, I showed how I had painted the Amera F214 Castle Keep.  At the time, I observed that the model would be improved by the addition of a flag.  Even though this was really a throwaway observation, I thought that I detected a subtle note of disappointment from my loyal followers that I hadn't attempted such an enhancement already.

Well, I haven't been able to come up with any compelling reason why I couldn't add a banner to the model, so I sat down this morning and got on with it.  Total time spent was perhaps 30 minutes on the build and rather more on the computer (designing the flag), so this wasn't a difficult project!

Materials

 The flag itself is made from paper.  I drew a suitable shape on the computer and filled it with an appropriate design (the golden, double-headed eagle on a black background matches the heraldry used by some of the Sheriff of Nottingham's men-at-arms in my Robin Hood collection).  This paper flag was then fixed to a simple flagstaff made from 2 pieces of bamboo skewer, notched slightly and glued perpendicular to each other.

Since I wanted the flag to be removable (partly for ease of storage and partly so that I could use different banners in the future), I made the pole much longer than you might have thought necessary.  The socket itself was created by cutting down the casing of a cheap pen that had just stopped working, very conveniently for me!

To brace the socket and prevent it from tearing off the model, I cut out 4 right-angled triangles from thick plasticard (though I imagine that any stiff material - scraps of cardboard, MDF or plastic - would do).  Originally I had made these triangular, with shorter sides of about 2.5" (8cm).  However when I tested them, I realised that they were too deep and so I cut the tips off them.  These parts are structural rather than aesthetic and therefore my original mistake won't matter in the finished model, but it does show once again the importance of dry-fitting everything before applying any glue!

Assembly

Working from the underside of the model, I drilled a hole in the middle of the keep.  This was just large enough for the flagpole to fit loosely.

 I cut down the pen casing to the right length and glued it over the hole, taking care to ensure that it was perpendicular to the surface.  Note: check the length before gluing!  You really don't want the pen to stick out below the base of the model!

The last part of the construction was to glue the 4 supports around the pen casing, thus giving the socket a considerable amount of support.

Finally, turn the model over and drop the flagstaff into the hole.  Simple!

Conclusions

• The flag and staff were made very quickly and without much attention to detail, but there's no reason why one couldn't spend a lot more effort on such a piece.
• I did consider placing the socket in one of the corners of the keep, instead of in the centre.  However it would have been greatly more difficult to work with the sloped plastic that is found there, so in the end I went with the much simpler option: the middle of the courtyard.
• When the flag is removed, the hole in the courtyard is barely visible (and would be even less so if I dabbed a little black paint over the edges of the drilled plastic).  I can still use the keep without a banner, if I desire.

The Amera Castle

Introduction

I'm a great fan of vac-formed plastic for terrain.  It's light and cheap and easy to work.  Some people may find the lack of detail to be an issue, but it doesn't bother me.  I have fond memories as a child of buying many of the old Bellona pieces, though sadly they are long gone and there doesn't seem to be much archive data about them on the internet.

The parcel from Amera, with a 12" (30cm) ruler for reference and some of the packaging material removed to create a better view.

 A short while ago, I ordered a few products from Amera.  My first thought when the parcel was delivered was "Oh, my - it's a huge box".  Dimensions are given for each of the products in their catalogue, but I hadn't paid much attention to them.  OK, that's not really a problem - terrain features shouldn't be too cramped or else figures won't fit in them!

The Castle Keep (F214)

Rather than describe all the pieces in the box, I'll show how I handled just one from start to finish.  This is mainly because it's the model that I've finished; the others have all been started but progress on them hasn't been as swift.  Hopefully this will also give you the idea that these pieces are really quick and easy to prepare.

The castle keep consists of a small rectangle of crenelated walls set on a hill, with a broad staircase leading up one size.  The hill is about 13" (33cm) across and the battlements are perhaps 5" (13cm) from the ground.  It may not be obvious from the picture, but there are small, flattened areas all over the hill, presumably so that figures on standard 1" (25mm) bases can stand there.  In the same vein, the staircase has a flat platform every few steps, easily big enough to hold a 28mm miniature.

I started by trimming the square base into a more rounded shape using a heavy pair of scissors.  This was fairly tough work; the plastic was about at the limit of thickness that my scissors could handle (and I wouldn't use high quality dressmaking scissors for this either - they would end up blunt or worse).  Partly I wanted to reduce the possibility of the sharp corners snagging on anything either during a game or in storage and partly I wanted to improve the appearance by removing the hard, straight edges from the base of the model.

Once trimmed, I coated the non-masonry parts of the model with tacky glue and then sprinkled this with grit (in clusters), followed by sand.

The piece was then undercoated.  I used the last of an old can of Games Workshop's "Roughcoat", which is (was - they don't make it any more) a mildly-textured spray paint.  It's as if there were some very fine grains of sand in the paint, which makes it very good for otherwise featureless terrain.  Now that I've finished the can, I'll have to look in my local hardware store for a similar type of spray from a different manufacturer.

After the undercoat, the masonry was given a wash with thinned-down black paint.  When that was dry, I dry-brushed the walls with a light grey.

On to the ground.  The dirt received a base coat of chocolate brown (raw umber), followed by dry-brushes of 2 successively paler browns.

Finally, flock and clump foliage was glued to the model fairly liberally.  In doing this, I tried to follow the following principles:

• don't flock over the "standing spots" where miniatures might be placed.
• vegetation often looks better in clumps, rather than spread evenly over the whole area.
• foliage is very good for covering up imperfections - either where the painting isn't very neat or where the underlying model isn't as good as it might be.  I placed a lot of clumps around the edge of the base, especially in the slightly unnatural "gulley" where the hill starts to rise from the flat base.

Conclusion

Big isn't difficult!  This model took no more than an hour or two of effort (though considerably longer than that in drying time).  It was also cheap; the castle keep cost no more than 2 or 3 28mm metal miniatures from the likes of Hasslefree. or maybe 10 plastic figures.  It's not a perfect representation of any real-life building, but it is designed for gaming and will work very well in that role.

Hmm, I wonder if I should have added a flagpole right in the centre?

Addendum

Simon Quinton has asked how big the stairs are on this model, so I've added another picture to the article.  The lowest flat part of the staircase is the smallest, but even that has the width for a 30mm base (just). A small part of the 30mm base overhangs the step below, though I think it wouldn't be enough to destabilise a model.  The 30mm base fits easily on any of the other platforms and on many parts of the path leading up to the keep as well.

The 25mm base has no trouble at all in fitting on any of the steps or other flat spots.

Further Addendum

To see this castle in use, have a look at this battle report: Robin Hood's Escape.