A Great Christmas Prezzie.......

 The Wargames Annual.

What a great gift. If you've been a good wargamer all year, pop this on your Christmas list.

There's a great wee article in there from me on the exploits of The Black Colonel. 

The Black Colonel pt1

I'm collecting figures for a mini campaign set around the time of the 1st Jacobite Rebellion for an article which I will be writing. 

As a kid my Dad took me to stay at a bothy at Inverey, just up the road from Braemar.  Behind the bothy were the ruins of the "castle" of  The Black Colonel, a staunch Jacobite who blew up his own castle as the redcoats came to take him after Killiecrankie and then hid in gorge to escape. A great story for a wee kid.

More was revealed in a book I have mentioned before on this Blog - Fenton Wyness's Legends of North East Scotland.

However it wasn't until fairly recently that I stumbled across John Farqhuarson once again. This time his exploits were more detailed. Mr Wyness was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story, but in truth the history was well worth following up.

Not only was there skirmish at Inverey, but at Braemar and another at Ballater too. 

Illustration and Re-enactors skirmishing in the woods at Braemar Castle

From Lesley Weston's blog

As I already have Jacobites it was a case of adding Williamite forces and as they seem to have been dragoons I started to look around for some. The venerable Dixon range is a little limited when it comes to dragoons. The obvious choice - Warfare - didn't come up with the goods either. I need horses as well as mounted and dismounted dragoon and I thought I'd have to make do with a mix of infantry and standing horses. However Ebor have now got Grand Alliance figures AND have dragoon units on foot with horse holders. Sorted! Even better they come with a mix of heads and poses so perfect for skirmish games and their Paul Hicks sculpts fit in with the older Warrior Miniature Jacobites. 

As these lads were far from the the campaigns going on in Ireland I have swapped two hats for highland bonnets and when it comes to painting breeches won't all be regularly uniform either.  These will be packed off and sent to the painter next week. 

For terrain I shall need a bastle house - the Colonel's "Castle". I already have a tower house suitable for Braemar, which didn't have its wall at this time, that's a later post Jacobite addition. For Ballater I thought I'd need more pine trees, but a hunt around the internet shows the pass of Ballater almost treeless in a 19thC photograph, it's carpet of pines is the result of later plantings. 

Whilst the figures are getting painted I will type up my notes into background and scenarios. These will be available later this year as part of a well known wargames publication. 

Another Jacobite Fight

This time a straight across the table fight featuring 6 Jacobite clan unit's and a small unit of Royal Ecossais against 3 Hanoverian line and two grenadier units. 

A scrappy engagement with lots of fluffed initiative rolls and swapping back and forth between the two sides without either side getting a change to get the upper hand. It did however stop the jacobites for getting a couple of telling charges in and caused them to take some more losses. But they rallied and drove the redcoats back to the table edge, despite them getting reinforcements in the shape of a fresh unit. In the end though weight of numbers began to tell and the remaining redcoats sued for peace after suffering the loss of a further unit. 

The Jacobites didn't get their own way tonight and a few times were kept off by the shooting and bayonet drill of the government troops. But they in turn couldn't quite fend off all the clan units and their perimeter shrunk and shrunk until they had nowhere left to go.

This was the second of our club Jacobite battles. We plan a third next week. Stay tuned! 

A Jacobite Game

 It's the 275th anniversary Culloden on the 16th and now that I have care of some jacobites I organised an online zoom game with mates from Oldmeldrum Wargames Club. 

Scenario notes and background were issued to the players before hand and the game itself was based on Prestonpans. A slight comms hiccup meant the Hanoverian commander didn't get orders back in time and one of his colleagues had the men deploy facing Edinburgh rather than the Jacobites who had listened to advice, looked at at the map and decided to march round the back of the redcoats. 

The battle was confusing, bloody and broke down into individual scraps and firefights. The melee capabilities of the clansmen were ferocious and the raw redcoats suffered from being wrong footed, struggling to turn and prepare and being poor shots. Not all went for the Jacobites - they lost control over their men once the clans got close enough to charge and at times fluffed activation rolls and had units retire whilst the action was still in full swing. However it went badly for the Hanoverians and they couldn't get organised to get their raw troops from causing anything other than minor damage to the highlanders. Their formation broke up and around half were cut down or fled by the games end.

A historical result and nice getting some toys on the tabletop