Prestonpans Houses

I haven’t posted anything on this site for 9 months. I had a knee replacement in early February, then with the Coronavirus lockdown other things have occupied me, including completing two more Military History talks, on the Battle of Fuengirola and Battle of Barrossa. Details of these talks can be seen on my other website here.

During the lockdown I watched one of my favourite films “A Bridge to Far” a couple of times. Inspired by this I have been reading a lot on the Market Garden campaign and decided to make a World War II set-up to recreate this. I have planned all of the Allied forces which I want to recreate and bought figures and vehicles for the British ones. I need to finish planning the Germans, then start modelling this. I will write about it in a future post.

Meanwhile, I thought I would complete my Jacobite Rebellion setup before starting a completely new project. I started by reviewing my scenery for Prestonpans. The only house which I originally created represents Preston House and can be seen on the banner at the top of this website. A larger version of that image is below:

The house which I used for Preston House is a conversion of one of the excellent Paper Terrain models.  I make all of my houses at 15mm scale, one scale down from my 1:72 figures.

As always with Paper Terrain models, it has a ruined version inside it. I originally saw this system used by Charles Grant over 50 years ago and really like it. The ruined version of this house is below:

I also used this house to represent Culloden House as shown in my post on Minor Raids during the Jacobite Rebellion. It looks a lot like Culloden House, but I am however becoming less sure that this is a reasonable representation of Preston House.

Preston House was completely demolished in the 1930s and I have been unable to find any painting, drawing or old photo to show what it looked like. There is a description of it on the Castles of Scotland website about Preston Tower. This old tower was in the grounds of Preston House but some way to the north of Preston House itself.

Preston Tower still exists and looks like this:

If I wanted to model it I would use a corner tower from my Medieval Castle.

I used that complete castle to represent the old Fort George at Inverness as shown here.

The Castles of Scotland website describes Preston House as in “Scotch baronial style”, which my current depiction is probably not.

I do however have an alternative, which is to use a model I made from the Paperboys Jacobite 45 book. The house can be seen in the back of the picture here, although I am not sure that Preston House had a tower, so I may stick with my original model.

Paperboys houses are designed to be suitable for 28mm figures, so I adjusted the scale which I printed it at. The completed house is below.

The original roof was a bit blue, so I toned it down before printing it. Paperboys houses do not have ruined versions, but I made one by reducing one to 95% as below.

I modelled steps in the tower from triangles of foamboard covered in stone coloured paper.

So that the undamaged house fitted over junction of the damaged tower and main house, I cut away a section inside the undamaged house junction.

There was one more house on the Prestonpans battlefield, and that was Bankton House. It was just south of Preston House as seen in the map below:

Bankton House does still exist and looks like this:

I decided to model this with a conversion of a Paper Terrain house as below:

Again I made a ruined version to go below the undamaged house.

Next, I will complete other features of the Prestonpans battlefield, namely a few more walls, the marsh and the wooden railway track.