A battlefield, a battle, a bus and more ………

In fact a mixed bag of stuff hobby related 😀 . So at the back end of last week I was up in Edinburgh visiting my Dad and took the opportunity to head across to the Battle of Bannockburn visitor centre. I had been to the battlefield a long time ago but don’t ever remember going round the visitor centre.

Is was a suitably cold and cloudy day

From the high ground around the main battlefield monument you get good views and there are several displays boards etc…

Robert the Bruce monument meant to mark the site of the Scottish camp 

The visitor centre has a pretty informative and enjoyable organised ‘tour’ and it gave an excellent overview of the battle

It includes a few modern computer generated displays including this one which attempts to put you into the heart of the battle ?

There is a nice wall display of what the chaos of battle probably did look like before the British broke and fled back across the Bannock Burn.

This weekend we had our first remote Hex based game of the year. Another trip to the Reconquista, deviate quite a bit of hunting on the internet it is remarkable how little is known about most of these battles. That of course is helpful in some ways giving me freedom to balance the forces. Here we have the Battle of Consuegra in Toledo. The Almoravids had been besieging the town itself when AlfonsoVI arrived to break the siege. The battle which took place outside the town is perhaps most notable as El Cid had not been able to come in support of Alfonso, instead he sent some of his best knights under the leadership of his son Diego Rodriguez who managed to get himself killed in the battle. Historically the Christians outnumbered the Almoravids but managed to over stretch themselves losing the battle, although Alfonso got away with his life ! With only limited historical details the setup is one with some balance, the Christian’s have slightly more troops but a generally weaker.

The Almoravids initially advance on their left.

But Diego counter charges and gets the better of the encounter.

In the centre the two infantry lines draw closer together neither quite ready to charge in where they may lose the advantage

With the Christian cavalry pushing through on the right the Arabs advance on the opposite wing

Here the better Arab infantry led by their commander Muhammad ibn Al-Hajj are close to breaking the Christian left flank.

Suddenly the battle started to become very closely contested and winning initiative became critical. 

Both sides have their break point/morale slowly broken and having trailed behind for most of the battle the Almoravids claw things back to level

Both armies are now shattered and badly mauled, the Christian’s have broken through on their right the Almoravids on the other flank, and both are close to capturing the enemy camp which will cause the win.

Some of the Christian right finds itself with little to do but watch !

In the end having started at 22 & 21 break points each we ended up at 2 & 1 left each, so literally the next combat would decide the battle. The Almoravid cavalry did have a slightly dodgy way into the Christian camp to claim victory but this felt slightly underhand after such a close battle so they chose to charge the peasant folk guarding the camp who somehow managed to save the day for Alfonso

As the very next activation was for Diego and his knights to capture the Almoravid camp. Technically then a Christian win but really a draw with both armies exhausted. A splendid battle which once again went right down to the wire both sides looking to capture that last final point for victory 👍

Next up the Bus , picked up for a charity shop in town a nice little model and pretty much 1/56 scale it has a slightly more worn appearance and I see this as some terrain for up and coming Mediterranean WW2 battles ? It probably needs a coat of paint but I will leave it for now.

Next up in discussions last weekend over the possible use of the M3 spare parts it came to life that the British often cut the top of these when damaged and used the chassis as tracked command or transport vehicles. A quick search on the internet and I found these two pictures to support the idea. Above a command vehicle 

Here used as transport

So with a lot of fiddling as you don’t get all the bits in the kit to make these from the leftovers I made this command vehicle

And three transports….I had some spare stowage so put as much of this on as possible, don’t look closely as there are some key bits of the tanks actually missing, but at 15mm they will do. The 0.50 cal machine guns were spare from the Sherman’s in the Tobruk starter set.

Sorry it has been a bit of a ramble but thanks for checking in

Matt ‘KBO’ 👍