Thirty Years War Castle

Today we have a larger model and one of my favourites. It was built during the 2000's for Scottish gamer Dave Imrie, of League of Augsburg and Claymore Castings fame. Dave wanted a mediaeval German castle but as it might have stood during the 17th century. There are many contemporary engravings which show this kind of structure. Away from the epic battles of the Thirty Years War, local campaigns went on across The Empire for loot and regional control, often resolving themselves as small-scale sieges. In this case the defences have improved by constructing a large artillery redoubt lower down the hill on which the castle stands.

In design terms, I wanted something that would be impressively vertical, without exaggerating the individual components. You can see it rises in stages from the hill to the castle yard, then the main building and finally the tower. 

The building techniques have mostly been described in earlier posts: foam card, Wills rounded tile sheets, cast details, the cliff from cork bark segments. The hill and redoubt were made from polystyrene foam, with a thick skin of filler, PVA and sand. The top of the tower with it's pepper-pot turrets was actually something I had made for my own walled town project years before, but decided it was never going to get used for that and would go nicely as part of this model.

The figures posed in the redoubt are Perry ECW, painted by my friend Garry Broom.