A small Pictish village

Introduction

I paint a lot of figures, mostly 28mm, for gaming.  However, men alone aren't enough for a wargame; we need terrain as well.  Every so often, I realise that I can't play a scenario that I would like because I don't have the right setting.  So it was with SAGA, when I realised that at least 1 of the standard scenarios in the basic rulebook requires buildings.

Many people use MDF kits of timber-framed Dark Age buildings for their games of SAGA.  Theses are widely available from various manufacturers.  However, my Dark Age warbands are based in Scotland and although timber or wattle-and-daub structures would certainly have existed in parts, the more remote corners of the land might well have had differently-constructed buildings instead.

The Raw Materials

I discovered that Scheltrum Miniatures produced resin models of stone dwellings that would be very appropriate for far-flung communities of Picts or similar Celtic groups.  Low (wind-proof!), stone buildings with turf roofs are especially likely in areas with limited access to wood, such as the Hebridean Isles or some parts of the north of Scotland.  Having decided that I wanted these, I bought a few small dwellings.  That was at Claymore 2012, so almost 3 years ago (ouch!).

I realised afterwards that I also wanted some walls from Scheltrum to go with them, to place the buildings in a more interesting context.  The walls were purchased separately, probably at another show a year or 2 later (I cannot remember for sure).  And so it remained for a long while...

Planning the Village

Finally, earlier this month, I decided to act and build my village.  After all the procrastination, it didn't take much effort at all when I finally got down to it!

Firstly, I found some large pieces of scrap paper and drew out rough plans of how the building and wall pieces would be placed.  This achieved several things: it showed me what size of bases would be required and it ensured that I made best use of the pieces available.

Next, I cut out bases from 3mm MDF and transferred the plans roughly onto these.  I left a margin of about 1" around the edges of each base and beveled the cut edges (my jigsaw can make cuts at up to about 45 degrees off vertical, which is very useful for this type of job).

The obvious next step was to glue on the buildings and the walls.  This revealed a problem, though: the wall pieces didn't join cleanly to each other and certainly didn't join to the buildings.  There were huge, unsightly gaps everywhere!

Mind the Gap!

OK, not to worry.  I rolled blobs of Milliput into rough balls and then pushed these into all the gaps, trying to match the existing layers of stones in the walls.

The joints between the baseboards and the resin pieces still looked a bit abrupt, so I used some filler to blend these together a bit.  I also added a few lumps and bumps to the enclosures, to try to avoid them looking as smooth as billiards tables!

Painting

After adding a few patches of sand and grit (again, to break up any large, blank patches), I undercoated the models with my usual Halford's grey car primer.

Note that as an afterthought I added some "gates" to the 2 larger enclosures.  These were simply pieces of Renedra's wattle fence, cut to fit.

Finishing

To start the painting, I gave all the stonework a black wash, followed by a heavy drybrush of "lichen grey".

The dirt was undercoated with chocolate brown, then highlighted with a couple of lighter shades of tan.

To finish, 2 separate types of flock and static grass were applied, with special attention given to the bottom of the walls and other nooks and crevices.  The few details  (gates, doorways, the guy ropes over the roof of the largest house) were painted separately and then the models were sealed with varnish.  Done!

Conclusion

These pieces were surprisingly quick to build, mainly due to the relatively small number of colours and details on them.  They'll be very useful for outlying communities in games of SAGA, I think.  And it's such a relief to have completed this project - finally!

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.