About Me

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No Fixed Abode, Home Counties, United Kingdom
I’m a 60-year-old Aspergic gardening CAD-Monkey. Sardonic, cynical and with the political leanings of a social reformer, I’m also a toy and model figure collector, particularly interested in the history of plastics and plastic toys. Other interests are history, current affairs, modern art, and architecture, gardening and natural history. I love plain chocolate, fireworks and trees, but I don’t hug them, I do hug kittens. I hate ignorance, when it can be avoided, so I hate the 'educational' establishment and pity the millions they’ve failed with teaching-to-test and rote 'learning' and I hate the short-sighted stupidity of the entire ruling/industrial elite, with their planet destroying fascism and added “buy-one-get-one-free”. Likewise, I also have no time for fools and little time for the false crap we're all supposed to pretend we haven't noticed, or the games we're supposed to play. I will 'bite the hand that feeds', to remind it why it feeds.

Thursday, April 6, 2017

O is for Old Basing

The village/hamlet to which the ruins of Basing House are now abutted.

This plaster model is closer to 15mm (for the gamers among you) and has given very different treatments to the layouts of both complexes, also you can see clearly how the landscape contours would have affected fighting in a way you can't really replicate on a gaming table


 
You can also see how fortified they were in this simplified architectural model, I count six keeps, a few other blockhouses and a more than a dozen other towers and turrets, both are walled and both [dry] moated along with other walls, banks and ditches. Note also the four bridges and central courtyard between both complexes and the main gatehouse/keep.

It was a formidable objective, raised above the surrounding landscape and with stores for a siege - its eventual taking must have had a negative effect on the Royalist moral and wider war-effort.


 
The two blurb panels are interesting reading from the period.

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