Carlisle Town

I thought I would make a model of Carlisle Town, as I had earlier done with Edinburgh. The town in the 18th Century looked like this’

Edinburgh Castle

This is the final part of my modelling Edinburgh as it was in 1745. My previous recent posts described modelling the town. This covers modelling the castle itself.

Edinburgh Castle in the mid-18th Century looked like this.

The ground around the castle was more open than it is now and the old city walls came right up to the castle. Many of the buildings on the southern and western sides of the castle had not yet been constructed.

Edinburgh Town – Part 2

In my previous post, Edinburgh Town Part – 1, I described how I used my existing Medieval wall system (plus a few new elements) and PaperTerrain houses from their Village and Town packs to create a model of Edinburgh as it was in 1745.

In this post I am going describe a number of additional model buildings which I have made to represent historical Edinburgh buildings.

The first of these is a simple conversion of a PaperTerrain village house into the famous “World’s End” pub, which was the last building before the Netherbow Port, hence its name which implies that there was nothing worth visiting outside Edinburgh old town. The pub is still there but the Netherbow Port gate was demolished in 1764. I think this “street view” is quite effective.

My model doesn’t look a lot like the pub, I just printed out the modern pub signs and added them to the building.

Improvements to Streets, Walls & Graveyards

Whilst assembling my modular Edinburgh Town, I have realised that some elements could be improved, namely streets, walls and graveyards.

Edinburgh Town – Part 1

Following on from my last post on additional troops (Regular, Militia and Volunteer) to defend Edinburgh, my current project is making a model of the City and castle, starting with the City. In 1745 it looked like this:

The castle is on the left (west) with the old town running down the ridge (now the Royal Mile) to Holyrood Palace on the right. There were almost no buildings of note north of the city until you reach the Forth.

Tents

Tented camps featured in a couple of battles during the Jacobite Rebellion. The first was at Falkirk, where the British Army was still in its tented camp as the Jacobites began to deploy, so hastily marched out, as shown in the map of the battle below:

The second was the night before the Battle of Culloden, when the Jacobites made an abortive night march on the British Army tented camp at Nairn.

I decided to make some model tents, which I could use in such scenarios.

Mercat Cross

A feature of most Scottish towns, and larger villages, was a Mercat Cross, an indication that the town or village had been granted the right to hold a market. The history of these is here, and there are 126 surviving ones in Scotland, although many have had substantial renovations.

One of the better known is that at Culross in Fife, which featured in the Outlander TV series and also in the 1971 version of the Robert Louis Stevenson Classic “Kidnapped”. The Culross Mercat Cross is below.

Churchyards

On 20th September 1745, the day before the main battle of Prestonpans, a Jacobite detachment of Camerons occupied the church and churchyard, just to the north of the village of Tranent. This detachment successfully ambushed a reconnaissance by the Customs Officer Walter Grosset, who had volunteered to help General Cope. The Cameron detachment had been placed there by Colonel O’Sullivan, without consulting Lord George Murray. It was a perfectly sensible military precaution to occupy such an advanced position, but Lord George Murray ordered them to be withdrawn. The church is shown on this map.

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: