Easter: Aberdeenshire 2017

Introduction

I've been a bit quiet on the blogging front for a couple of weeks.  That's because we were away on holiday for the first week of our children's Easter holiday and then I've been catching up with work &c for the second week.  For what it's worth, we spent our vacation in southern Aberdeenshire.  The weather was glorious: we spent 7 hours or more walking each day, becoming very tired and a bit sunburnt in the process and found over 100 geocaches.  But you probably don't want to hear about that.

I imagine that my audience are primarily wargamers, military modellers and the like.  What can I tell you about our travels that might interest you?  Let's see...

Saint Palladius Church

This architectural marvel was situated just a few minutes away from where we were staying in Glensaugh.  It's near Drumtochty Castle and is a very unusual shape for a Scottish church.  The next time you're tempted to make a model of a rectangular or cruciform church, remember that you can have curves, towers and turrets as well!

Bridge of Dye Pillboxes

In the small hamlet of Bridge of Dye there are 2 pillboxes of World War II vintage, one on either side of the road.  They're ideally placed to guard the nearby bridge, which is one of the few places in the area where the local river might be crossed.  So far, so good - but there are some things which puzzle me here:

• These pillboxes are made from stone blocks, rather than the more common reinforced concrete.  Would that provide the same level of protection?  I don't know.
• These defences are very well situated to protect against attacks from the west.  However, given that Bridge of Dye is extremely rural and that there isn't really much to the west except mountains, against whom were they expecting to defend?

I suppose that it's possible the stone blocks would help with camouflage by making the pillboxes appear to be part of a garden wall.  Or maybe concrete was in short supply in wartime and was reserved for more strategically important locations?  Perhaps these were used for training (where the east/west facing and choice of construction material wouldn't matter), rather than being serious preparations against a foreign invasion?  Maybe they were even a misplaced folly built by an over-enthusiastic local commander or landowner?  I just don't know...

Crathes Castle

Some 25 minutes journey to the north of our apartment, near the picturesque town of Banchory, is Crathes Castle.  The core of this is a fairly typical, large 16th century tower house, though much extended at later dates.  It's owned by the National Trust for Scotland and has extensive grounds including a walled garden and lots of woodland.

Dunnottar Castle

On the Aberdeenshire coast, just south of the town of Stonehaven, we visited Dunnottar Castle.  As you can see from my picture, this is now a ruin, but in its day it was a strong fortress in a very imposing location on a near inaccessible promontory.  Probably it's most famous achievement was to protect the Honours of Scotland (crown, sword and sceptre) from Cromwell's army.  The castle only fell after a siege of 7 months, but before then the honours had been smuggled out and were hidden in a nearby kirk (church).

Inverbervie Pillbox

Finally, we found another pillbox.  This time it was located on the coast at Inverbervie, over looking a river mouth and beach.  There are also a number of tank or landing craft traps stretching away from the pillbox and on the other side of the river; these were surprisingly large (maybe 1 metre in each dimension?) and still in very good condition.  Sadly, the pillbox itself had a lot of litter in and near to it: discarded drink cans, broken glass and the like.

Conclusion

If castles are your thing then Aberdeenshire is something of a paradise!  There are many, many such buildings, including medieval ruins, stately homes and everything in between.  If you can get the right weather then I would highly recommend this area for a holiday.  It's also good for walking, cycling and other outdoor pursuits.

For what it's worth, we stopped briefly at Doune Castle (famous for the filming of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, amongst other things) in Stirlingshire on our return journey.  However, we didn't go inside as this was just a quick break to walk the dogs - you'll have to wait for another time to hear about this one!

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!

Arran: Prehistory to Vikings

Introduction

Once again it's the summertime and my family and I have been on our holidays.  This time we decided to go to the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde.  Although this island is quite close to my home (30 miles/50 Km, as the crow flies?) and to the city of Glasgow, it is a very different place.  Culturally and physically it's much closer to the Hebridean islands than it is to the big city or to the rolling farmlands of Ayrshire on the mainland just to the east.  Instead, Arran has rugged hills, woodlands and deer-infested moors.

This geographical distinctiveness, together with its strategic location in the middle of the Firth of Clyde, has made Arran important over many millennia.  As tourists, we spent a lot of time hillwalking (though we did have time to visit the distillery as well :-) ) and everywhere we went there were traces of past generations.  So, in the hopes that some of these will be of interest to my (mostly wargamer) readership, here are a few moments from history.

Neolithic

It's hard to step out of doors in Arran without treading on a hut circle, chambered cairn or standing stone!  Before our visit I didn't know much about the island and it was a big surprise to discover just how important it is as a location for prehistoric monuments.  Actually I suspect that the hut circles are the traces of Iron Age dwellings rather than Neolithic, but all of these were pretty much invisible to an amateur like me anyway, so let's just ignore them.

The "Giant's Grave" chambered cairn

Here's the remains of one of the chambered cairns; this probably dates from around 4,000BC .  That's over 6,000 years old, or perhaps 1,500 years older than the oldest of the famous Egyptian pyramids at Giza.  I don't know about you, but I find that very impressive!

The stones that remain form the walls of one of the chambers in the tomb.  Originally the whole structure would have been covered with a huge mound of soil.  It's not obvious from the picture, but this is a "Clyde pattern" cairn: it would have had a large courtyard with entrances to a number of chambers that were built into the mound.

Above are a couple stone circles that can be found on Machrie moor. While they may not be individually as large as Stonehenge, they're part of a group of ancient remains that includes at least 5 circles within a few hundred metres of each other.  And you can get right up to the stones to study or play with them, or just gawp in wonder.  Eat your heart out, Salisbury Plain!

A very rough date for the stone circles would be 2,000BC - so maybe 2,000 years later than the burial cairns.

Dark Ages

Pictish snake carvings inside King's Cave.  Move your mouse over this to see the outlines more clearly

On the west coast of Arran there are many small caves.  The largest of these is known as "King's Cave", after a (Victorian?) association with Robert the Bruce.  Apparently it was known as "Fingal's Cave" before that.

Inside King's Cave there are a number of carvings from (loosely) around 1,000 years ago.  I saw a line of Irish Ogham writing as well as what looked like early Christian crosses.  I don't know how to read Ogham, but I suspect that it would have read "Máedóc was here" or something like that!

There are a number of Pictish animals in the cave as well; the picture above is of an area where someone had been practising his snakes.

Medieval

Lamlash Bay from the north.  Note the steep-sided Holy Isle at the mouth of the bay.  The building on Holy Isle is a Tibetan Buddist retreat, I kid you not!

This is Lamlash bay, on the east coast of Arran.  It is particularly associated in my mind with the Vikings.  In 1263, the elderly King Hakon IV of Norway led a fleet to enforce his claim to large parts of western Scotland.  Lamlash was used as a harbour by the Norsemen whilst they stripped Arran of food and supplies, so at that time this harbour would have been full of Viking ships.

Eventually, an autumn gale drove part of the Norwegian fleet onto the shore of the mainland at Largs.  When the Scots army of King Alexander III tried to capture or destroy the stranded ships, this precipitated the Battle of Largs.  I was brought up to believe that this was a very significant Scottish victory that sent the Vikings packing, but it seems that the modern opinion regards it as an inconclusive skirmish.  Instead, it was the death of Hakon later in the year that caused the Norwegians to retreat; his successor wasn't as interested in the Scottish isles and basically sold them to Alexander III in the Treaty of Perth (1266).

Lamlash bay was also used by the Royal Navy during World War II.  Amongst other things, it was the location for the "Lily" experimental floating airfield.  I haven't been able to find out anything much about this, though it sounds interesting!

Lochranza castle

At the far north-west tip of Arran is the small town of Lochranza.  As well as being home to the island's only whisky distillery, it also has the remains of Lochranza castle.  Like many such ruins, what you see today is the last phase of development (in the late middle ages, so maybe 1500 to 1600 AD).  However there are still traces of the earlier versions, if you know how to interpret the evidence.  I was particularly struck by how many times the main entrance to the castle had been moved and the earlier doorways blocked up.  From memory, the first entrance was on the north side and in an upper level that would have required a (wooden?) stair or ladder.  The current door is on the south side and at ground level.  I think there was also an intermediate entrance in the east wall?

Wildlife

I'm not going to say much about the wildlife we saw on Arran, but this beauty caught my eye.  He's a large dragonfly, perhaps 4" (10cm) long.  One of these flew into the car whilst we were driving - the windows were all down because of the heat - and caused consternation for 5 seconds or so until it found its way out.  Final thought, for pulp or fantasy gaming: imagine if this insect was 4 feet long instead of 4 inches...

I'll be back to more directly-relevant gaming articles soon, but I hope you've enjoyed this interlude as much as I have.

The Workbench, January 2014

Introduction

It's that time of year again when I hope to do a lot of painting during the holiday season.  However, as usual, a combination of family duties and sickness has prevented much progress.  For comparison, this is the state of things one year ago: http://colgar6.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-workbench-december-2012.html.  One of these years I will get stuff done over the Christmas and New Year holidays!

So instead of showing you all my output for 2 weeks of effort, here's a record of my untidy workbench...

The Bench

Let's start the tour at the left hand side.  Here we have one of my Christmas presents: a box of figures destined for SAGA.  Most of them are monks, some of whom are armed.  These will form an angry mob, probably for my Scots warband (since they're angry at the Vikings, they cannot be part of that force).  There are also another bard and a mounted Scots warlord in the box.

Further back, but still on the left, is my Barbarian army for Hordes of the Things.  This was last year's Christmas present and I have actually completed 3 bases of it.  Only another 9 or so to go...

Next to that, there is a pile of boxes.  The top box contains a mixture of figures that are waiting to be sealed.  I managed to run out of varnish a day or two into the holiday season, just as all the small hobby retailers shut up shop for 2 weeks!  Still, as soon as the ordered materials arrive, it will only take a few moments to finish off these models.

The next box down in the stack contains another Christmas present.  This is a small squadron of starships that I will use as Tholians in my "not Trek" games.  Tholians were a very minor race in the Star Trek universe, most notable for their unique energy web technology.  I'll need to come up with some appropriate Full Thrust rules for the Tholian Web...

To the front of my painting station is a plank bridge.  My apologies for the quality of the photograph; this didn't come out well and I haven't the energy to re-take it.  The bridge is my first attempt at using coffee stirrers as building materials; I think it'll be quite effective when finished.

The rest of the painting station is the normal jumble of figures in various stages of construction:

• There are a few Dark Age warriors (part of my nascent Anglo Dane SAGA warband) to the front left.
• Several buff-coated cavalrymen and their horses are visible; these will add to my force of Witch Hunters.
• A couple of Dreadball teams are in the clear trays in the centre.
• Most of the other figures are assorted Old West gunslingers & civilians and modern zombies & survivors.

Finally, my West Wind bikers can be seen at the rear right, where they have languished since last year's workbench posting.  Oh, well - maybe I'll finish them this year!

We're all going on a Summer holiday...

If you've been wondering why I've not published anything of my own or commented on other people's blogs recently then that's because my family and I were away on our summer holiday.  Of course if you hadn't even noticed that I was gone then that's good too... :-(

We spent 2 weeks in a cottage on South Uist.  For those of you who don't know much Scottish geography, South Uist is one of the Outer Hebrides; an island chain off the north west of the British mainland.  It's fairly remote, though they do have electricity, postmen, shops and so on.  Also, it's one of the last places where Gaelic is still spoken in the home.

Me and the dog on a beach, South Uist, 2013

I did take my model-making "travel box" with me, fully intending to make up a load of card models (mostly furniture &c this time).  However, I just didn't get round to doing anything with it this time.

To try to keep this article at least somewhat focused on a history and military theme, I did take a picture of a ruined iron age wheelhouse (circa 200AD):

Prehistoric wheel house, c. 200AD

Actually, this ruin was rather more impressive in real life than it appears in the photograph.  It's basically a big hollow in the ground with radial stone partitions (like the spokes of a wheel) and a central hearth.  It would have had a mound (of stone and turf?) to cover the building and had a "tunnel" entrance facing away from the prevailing wind.  Quite cosy, I imagine.

Part of the rocket range, purpose unknown

During the Cold War, parts of the northern 10 miles or so of South Uist were used as a rocket test range.  Apparently, some bits are still used for that purpose, though only infrequently, I think.  Anyway, this installation is obviously abandoned.  It could date to any time from 1958 right up to 1990 or even later.  I don't know what it would have been used for, but my guess is that it held some kind of tracking device, either radar or optical.  It would be interesting if anyone else knows what this structure housed.

Castle, South Uist, 2013

We did see a few castles on the island.  This is one of the more impressive ones.

Seals, Eriskay, 2013

Now I'm stretching the gaming/military theme past breaking point, I think!  Above is a picture of some seals on the neighbouring island of Eriskay.  Just after the photo was taken, the mid-sized seal (in the water) landed near the small one (left of picture) and, not to put too fine a point on it, pushed it into the sea.  I'm guessing that this was a bit of sibling rivalry, though the large seal on the right (mum?) didn't intervene.

Normal service will be resumed soon.  In the meantime, I'm feeling very relaxed :-) ...