On the workbench- The great invasion of Craigshire or Volunteers stand ready !

 One of the classics of railway modelling is by P D Hancock . He is the Grant or Young of the hobby. In his most famous book he created another county in Scotland, Craigshire and used it as a place to create layouts around . Here is one of his maps-

The second map shows how he added land to the map of eastern Scotland in a clever and creative way.

This is the book the maps came from. It is a terrific read and I come back to it again and again. Recently l have been reading these books-

An idea began to form. What if Craigshire had volunteer units and they were engaged in trying to repulse an invader. After all the late 19th century saw Volunteers come to the fore and fears of invasion were rife. I found this in the plastic mountain and I was away gluing and painting-

This handy box of figures provides home service helmeted heads as well as the pith helmets . A look on the internet for volunteer uniform ideas and this is what l produced-

Initially l raised five figure units for  The Portable Wargame with a possibility l might make them 10:man for skirmish games in the future, we will see…

Also l have done some thinking about the identity of the invaders but that is for another day…