Mika’s Year 7 Castle Assignment – Berkhamsted Castle in 1:550th scale

Every Year 7 (age 11-12) student in the UK builds a motte and bailey castle. Dana did it five years ago with her Year 7 Castle Assignment – Lütjenburg Castle in 1:150th scale. This year it was Mika’s turn at a motte and bailey. As with the earlier project, Daddy was going to be involved. In fact, because Mika remembered watching Dana’s project unfold, she insisted on my involvement because she was determined to get the same recognition from the school as her sister had received. Luckily, I’d been thinking about this for five long years!

---

The end result

The chosen castle was Berkhamsted Castle, in Hertfordshire, UK. This is local to us being only 30 minutes drive away. It is a classic motte and bailey and was one of the castles William the Conqueror commissioned in 1066 to encircle London. We walked through the ruins last year which is why it sprung to mind … okay, okay, that is backwards. Cards on the table, I thought Berkhamsted might be a good candidate so I arranged for the family to visit so Mika could have a look before she got the castle assignment.

Berkhamsted shares some attractive features with Lütjenburg castle. It still exists so we can see what it looks like now, although Berkhamsted is in ruins. When first built it was wooden – which is easier to model. Our reconstruction is from 1086 AD so about 20 years after the initial build but before the rebuild in stone. And it has a moat, and moats are just cool. Actually, as a bonus, it has two moats, so that has to be doubly cool.

But there is a key difference to Lütjenburg as well. Berkhamsted is big. It had six layers of protection: outer moat, outer bank + palisade, inner moat, inner bank + palisade, motte, tower. The bailey at Lütjenburg was big enough for a few houses and a chapel, but the one at Berkhamsted is huge and could have fit an entire village although admittedly most of the space was kept open.

Ultimately the area covered by Berkhamsted is about three to four times as much as the area of Lütjenburg castle. Even at 1:150th scale we found the Lütjenburg model was quite big; too big to bring home. So we had to go smaller for Berkhamsted. We found a MDF baseboard of about the right size for a model and scaled the castle down to fit. This meant it came out at 1:550th scale, which is roughly 3mm in wargaming terms.

Generally Mika and I used the same modelling techniques for Berkhamsted, as Dana and I had used for Lütjenburg. However, the smaller scale of the model meant we had to tweak a few things. Firstly, we used filler rather than sand for the earth texture. Secondly, we used thin balsa wood for the palisades rather than toothpicks. Thirdly, we didn’t bother with texturing the balsa wood on the assumption nobody would be able to see planks in 1:550th scale. Lastly, the houses had to be tiny, tiny tiny, so we had to modify the templates, simplify them, to make them work at the much smaller scale. Otherwise the construction was the same.

---

Step by step construction

The pictures tell the story. We captured most steps. I think we forgot to photograph dry brushing the earth – the sequence is paint on flat earth, the dry brush dark sand paint, then finish with a dry brush of pale sand paint. Otherwise everything is below.