A Little Find

I was planning to post about the roads project I worked on last year, but I am afraid my internet access has been playing up. If I mention the term "DNS server", some of you will know what level of trouble I have been contending with. If you have no idea what "DNS server" means, count yourself amongst those upon whom the gods have smiled. 

Anyway, whilst waiting for months to speak to some godforsaken customer service department, I was idly scrolling through images in my terrain reference folders, specifically the one with pictures of Spanish buildings, which I'd had no cause to look at for a long while. To my surprise I stumbled across the image below. What it shows is a demo game from a show at Reading(?) in about 2013. The game was mounted by my late good friend Mark Sturmey and was based on the First Carlist War in Spain, featuring a collection of buildings, images of which I lamented back in December as being lost for good. So this was a nice little find. I don't know who the photograph was taken by, and I'm afraid it's not entirely in good focus, but it gives some idea of what these buildings were like, in particular the elaborate church. I made that myself, but the other buildings were a joint production between me and Mark, who passed away five years ago now after bravely fighting Motor Neurone Disease. Mark was learning to build and paint terrain very skilfully before the cruel condition took away that possibility. 

These are all based on the building style typical of the Basque region, the heart of the Carlist insurrection. Most houses were built of bare stone, but some were rendered and others of timber-framed construction. The church is based on one still standing in a town there. Unusually it has a plain back, but then a quite elaborate baroque façade and porch added in the late 17th century. I laboured long over this, using Wills stone sheets and several parts which I moulded and cast. There are also several "bits and bobs" from own Bohemia setup, which you will be seeing properly in due course: a statue, a covered well and wayside shrine.