Every Englishman needs a Castle

Donnington Castle - a quick scratch-build project

I didn't have a castle so John lent me his gatehouse to act as Donnington Castle in our upcoming bath-tubbed refight of the Second Battle of Newbury, 27th October 1644, in the English Civil War (ECW).

While looking the part, when I put it on my table it was clearly going to dominate the look of the whole thing.  Likewise, the manor I was lent to play the part of Shaw House.

While perfect for some skirmish gaming, e.g. with my Three Musketeers, it made my whole table look like little more than the grounds surrounding the house.

While I had an OO Dapol kit, the Country Inn, that could serve for Shaw House I was lacking anything like a castle.  So, a scratch-build was the only option, but looking at the castle I decide I would only build the gatehouse, which is all that's left nowadays.

A quick scramble through the loft located my foamboard and a suitable cardboard tube that was holding my maps of Spain.  This was quickly cut into two lengths for the gatehouse towers - shown with a few 25mm Hinchliffe ECW figures used to help gauge how small (sub-scale) I could make it without it appearing silly.

The walls for the main part of the gatehouse were made from foamboard with the foam cut out for the corners, and the butt joint where the two ends are joined. 

The folds have a 90° cut-out section (±45°) ...

... and the butt-joint, simply has the foam backing removed from one end the same length as the depth of the other end to be slotted in.

Hopefully, how this works can be seen with the walls folded round into shape and held in there with an elastic band.

The 'towers' then had sections cut out so they would fit around the front corners.

The next task was to come up with a suitable render for the castle, which called for something like a flint wall effect.  Finding a picture online was not a problem.

But, tiling this image to print out and cover the walls is always a chore, involving lots of manual pixel manipulation in MS Paint.  But this time I tried something different, AI, namely ChatGPT.  ChatGPT did the job, albeit I had to go through several iterations of instruction before it did what I wanted.  Nonetheless, it was quicker and a much less onerous than doing it manually.  So, I printed the walling out of A4 sized label paper and applied it to the component parts, and then glued gatehouse walls into their final form with PVA - shown here with more elastic bands to hold it in place while drying.

It was then a case of adding all the features such as: windows, doors, merlons, stone courses, etc.  This was very fiddle and quite time consuming, and with time pressing[1] I stopped taking photos.

It might've gone badly wrong, but it didn't.  And here it is, in place on the field of battle and ready for action.

More pictures should follow in the post on the battle to be fought.

Notes:

[1] The castle was only finished earlier today, and as I sit here typing this, the game is scheduled for the day after tomorrow, and I need to do a quick review of my rules to make sure there's nothing in this game they can't cope with - so I cut it quite fine.