This is one of several models of Basing
House (or 'Basing Castle') we will be looking at over the next few days and is
the all-weather outdoor site-model of the whole siege-area, cast in bronze and
positioned so that you can place the remains in the context of the time - we
won't look at the remains, they really aren't anything to look at and I didn't
photograph them!
I believe the walls were part of a more
permanent or existing defence, but most of the banks and ditches (not the main dry-moats
to the house complex but those further out) are from the ECW siege.
Another view of the main house complex
which was actually two houses, the old circular-walled 'Norman' fortified house
and the more modern 'New House' where the family lived in rather grander
splendor that the old buildings could provide, the two entered through a
citadel gatehouse to the North - removed by vandals.
At this scale the New House looks to be a
nice Elizabethan country house, maybe half timbered and a bit posh, and it was
all those, but it was also as heavily fortified as the old house and made for
war not Waugh; If you get what I mean!
I think this would benefit from a midnight
commando raid (it's not terribly secure) with a handful of micro-tanks so that
the next day tourists find a motorised panzer regiment streaming in from the
top, while tank destroyers sit waiting in the village with an A/T-gun screen
and a mixed battle group is strung-out over the old main camp of Parliament to
hold the wing and direct the armour along the river toward the anti-tank
ambush!
One day I'll drink enough to get caught
doing it - torch in my teeth; "Peow-peow"!
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