Countryside Board

The English countryside is a well ordered pastoral landscape. I remember flying to Heathrow airport as a teen and passing over the manicured fields and towns of southwest England. It looked just like a wargames table from the air. No wonder wargaming is so popular in England!  So now on to my country table; its not fully planed out yet. But I do know I want it to look like a picture I have in a book. Its a picture of a ruin on a hill behind a sleepy village. Sorry I don't have the picture digitized. The ruin in the picture looked something like this:
 
The hill with the ruin will be at one end of the table, a four building village will be in the middle and the far end will have fields and hedges. So you can see, it's sort of planned out.

I'm incorporating a piece of Warhammer scenary into this project as the ruin.  Fortuitously for me, my mate had asked me to assemble a GW ruined tower kit some time back. Since we no longer play Warhammer and I'll be scratch building most of the buildings, this seems like a great idea to me to use this as the ruin.

The kit is called the Dreadstone Blight Now I like this kit, its made from thick styrene and is fairly durable. But, its a GW kit so of course it needs hard work to make it fit together. You'd think after all this time GW would have learned how to make a kit that actually fits together properly! But No they didn't. You'll need to do a fair amount of filing to get the first floor sections to fit together and form a circle. I got as close is I could and then filled in the gaps with putty.

 You can see where the pieces don't fit exactly. This was as close as I was able to get it.

I had to cover up the gaps where the pieces didn't join together properly with putty. That was basically all of them. Also all the pieces have these jig saw puzzle piece edges. I had to fix the edges that are not supposed to connect to another piece by adding additional stones. The skulls on this piece are not as obnoxious as most other GW scenery kits. Even so I wanted to remove some of the warhammer iconography, but the owner (my mate) dis-aloud it. A bit of a shame IMO. I could have replaced it with some crosses to give it less of a warhammer feel.

Stay tuned for the next Countryside Board update.