Scottish/ Welsh Wars Miscellany.

Following a day of hedge planting in Cheshire at the end of last week I took a short detour on the way home to take a look at one of Edward I's more unusual & less well known castles at Holt on Dee.

Unusual in that the inner ward is constructed entirely on top of a sandstone outcrop, so that its ground floor would have been level with the first floor of the outer curtain wall. This fact & the surrounding marshy ground would have made it quite a tough nut to crack in a siege, though I suspect its main purpose, given its position on a crossing point of the River Dee between England & Wales, would have been imposition of tax on livestock drovers & merchants.

There isn't a lot left to see, though considerably more than last time I drove past when the entire structure was overgrown with ivy & bramble. The structure was slighted after the 1st Civil War & further denuded when masonry was shipped off for use in the construction of Eaton Hall further along the Dee. As you can see, the builders are currently in stabilising the site & putting handrails in place so one would assume the site is going to be open to access before much longer.

Some more progress has been made with the Lion Rampant retinue, here are a couple of the Highland Archers currently WIP:

Still managing to keep up a steady output of figures from the Workbench of Doom, despite being busy in the day job, one of our current projects is an American Barn for stabling horses, but if you would like a 36'x24' war-games shed building we would be happy to oblige.