A Border Watchtower for Dux Britanniarum

 My very understanding and long-suffering wife bought me a watchtower from Warbases for Christmas and I really enjoyed doing a bit of crafting over the festive period to put it together, with a few modifications of my own. 

This is the basic watchtower, with a few modifications… the lower corners have lolly sticks added, just to make them look a little stronger and I thought the soldiers who visited the tower would possibly want to offer a prayer to Mithras, the God of War, so I scratch built a rather ramshackle shrine so that they could do so.

The shrine is built from various spare bits from previous building projects. The columns and the roof are left over parts from a Charlie Foxtrot Eastern Front house I built for Chain of Command games and the shrine itself, I think, is from Wargames Foundry; it had a Roman chap in a toga attached to it so I lopped him off and he will, no doubt, be used in some other future project… waste not want not!

With a bit of tiny scale printing and some very fiddly gluing, I was able to add a mural of Mithras slaying the bull on the back wall. As this was an afterthought, getting the image inserted past the shrine and into its allotted place took more than a fair share of patience.

When the tower was built, I decided that it couldn’t possibly be placed on the table top just as it was; it needed a grander or more imposing setting to make it a more dramatic feature, dominating the surrounding countryside.

The best solution seemed to be to stick it on top of a hill but, as I didn’t have one, I had to set about building one, a project that has taken about a month to complete which certainly puts the creation of the Earth in seven days into context.

I built my hill out of assorted bits of polystyrene, which, thanks to Lockdown, were still littering up my garage after fitting some new kitchen appliances. The polystyrene was covered in Polyfilla and painted in various shades of grey to give it a “rocky outcrop” appearance. The palisade fencing came from Renedra and the gate was scratch built, again, from bits of Charlie Foxtrot Russian housing! A liberal sprinkling of Warlord tufts, a few randomly scattered “boulders” and a stack of amphora from Iron Gate Scenery finished off the job.

What started out as a fairly straightforward model building project has turned out to be something of a marathon, but I’ve loved every minute I’ve spent building my lofty watchtower, even the bits that went wrong, like when I realized that the top layer of my hill was sloping wildly and I needed to add an extra layer to the bottom of it to level it up! I don’t think these watchtowers were ever meant to be permanently garrisoned, rather they were used as a temporary base to scout out enemy raiding parties when they landed nearby for pillage and plunder. My hilltop tower wouldn’t be defendable against a determined and well equipped Saxon or Irish raiding force, but it would give a local scouting party somewhere to shelter and a quick offering to Mithras at the shrine would certainly bolster their courage for the fighting that lay ahead.

The watchtower model is available from Warbases... click the link to get one for yourself...

Watchtower (warbases.co.uk)