Monthly Archives: March 2023

Following on from my last blog, I have now completed 12 of my Irish Cavalry – the armoured warriors or lords. You can see how they look in the picture above. The next stage was to complete the 4 unarmoured ‘horse boys’ or Kern that would ride with them. I needed a figure in a tunic rather than mail shirt as a base and after a hunt through the lead pile I found a box of very old, now discontinued Wargames Factory Celt cavalry. The detail on these figures is fairly ‘soft’ so adapting them looked like a straight forward option. However, I wanted my horse boys to be bare legged. Some major surgery was required!

Once again, a dive into the lead pile turned up some old Lucid Eye Jaguar warriors with bare legs and feet. It was just a case of snipping off the plastic celts legs and replacing them with the Jaguars legs. My trusty Xuron cutters were ideal for this as if used the right way around, you get a pretty much perfectly flat cut, even through the metal. It was then a simple task to super glue the legs onto the torso. I didn’t need to pin them – my favourite thick expo super glue is well suited to this and a quick spray of accelerant ensured a fast bond.

I also found a ‘kern head’ in my spares box – I had removed it from a Perry’s Irish kern when converting them to give a bit of variety to my Kern units. The arms are from the Wargames Atlantic Goth set and the Celt figure, The shield is a Jaguar shield with the rim filed off and the horse is a Warlord Games Civil war horse with all the saddlery filed away. Once again I didn’t change the bridle and tack on the horse – a step too far for me! I did add a cushion from green stuff and tried to model his tunic using the same material.

I used the same procedure to make the second Kern but having no more Irish heads, I reverted to a perry’s WOTR head (from the light cavalry set, I think). I pushed my sculpting ‘skills’ to the limit and tried to sculpt on the long sleeves that you see on Kern. The result was not quite what I wanted. It’s fair to say that I wont be putting the Perry’s out of business any time soon….

They looked a bit better with a coat of paint but when it came to the next two horseboys, I chickened out of further attempts at sculpting the shirts or léine and left them in tunics.

So with the horse boys completed, I now had my two units of Irish cavalry ready for battle. There was just one problem – they didnt have a commander! So it was back to the Goth cavalry to make a suitable leader for my units. I decided that the commander should look different to the rest of the troop, so I made a slight change to his head gear, giving him a helmet without the nose guard but adding a plume, similar to ones that I had seen in John Derrickes pictures ( see my blog – Researching Irish Cavalry). I also wanted the commander to be wearing an Irish Brat or cloak, so it was back to the green stuff!

As you can see, I’ve also added some Irish Wolf hounds to the base – it seemed that a Lord would take his dogs on campaign even though I couldn’t find any particular references to dogs being used for warfare. The wolf hounds are from Footsore miniatures. The cloak was, I thought, too long, so you will see that I went back and shortened it for the final model.

When it came to painting the Irish commander, I went for a black horse, just to make him different. I also painted the helmet black and used quite a bit of gold rather than plate mail for the accessories. I have painted the Cloak in a Plaid style. As I write this, I’m not really that pleased with it – it’s a bit too fussy. I may go back and repaint it in a simpler style but for now, I’m calling it done. The Irish are ready to take to the battlefield!

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Following on from my last blog, here are some notes as to how I went about modelling my Irish Cavalry. I am producing units for use in the game ‘Never Mind the Bill Hooks’, Specifically, the Hibernian section. I already have an Irish army but it was a bit light on points – I needed 120 points of troops to fight in the Bill Hooks BASH day coming up in April. My infantry contingent consists of 96 points of Kern and Gallowglass, so two units of light cavalry, at 12 points each, would give me a nice looking fast moving army. In NMTBH’s, Light cavalry come in units of 8 figures. Irish cavalry are allowed to ‘skirmish’, but also to dismount and form a 6 figure unit of Gallowglass, or with two cavalry units, a unit of 12 Gallowglass. The spare riders are assumed to be holding the horses.

That gave me the idea that I would build 6 armoured figures in each unit and then have 2 ‘horse boys’ or Kern that would act as the horse holders. This reflected the nature of Irish Cavalry, although in reality, I suspect that there would have been more ‘Horseboys’ supporting the lords in the unit – they were tasked with supplying replacent javelins and if necessary, remounts. All that said, there is evidence to suggest that the ‘horse boys’ weren’t mounted but ran along side the cavalry or were simply the boys that looked after the horses back at camp. Regardless, I decided that I would have some ‘kern’ types mounted on horses!

I had already settled on using the Gripping Beast Goth Cavalry as being a close match to the later Irish cavalry. They are equipped with long mail shirts, conical helmets and there are no saddles on the horses.

With 12 figures in the box, this would give me just enough to make two units, if I could find a way of making the horse boys or Kern.

As I have previously said, The heads supplied with the Goth Cavalry look just like Goths….and not like Irish Lords. In addition, they all had flowing Plumes, not at all in the Irish Style. However, the heads in the Wargames Atlantic Goths set looked much better for my purposes. I am lucky enough to have a small group of gaming buddies who are happy to swap up their spares and Andy Callan kindly gave me a couple of sprues from the Wargames Atlantic set that was sitting in his lead pile.

I chose the heads without the plumes and shaved down the nose guards and replaced them with a upturned guard that I had made from bending a small strip of Evergreen 0.25mm x1.00mm around a paper clip to get the curve. Plastic card that is this thin is easy to bend, particularly if you gently warm it first. It is a fiddly operation but it works.

The nose guard is probably exaggerated and I did cut them down a bit more when the glue had dried. I thought that I might as well have it as an exaggerated feature rather than it not being seen. I removed the leggings with a scalpel and sanded them down. The reference pictures show the ‘Lords’ in leggings with spurs on their shoes. The cushion was simply a ball of green stuff pressed into place.

I varied the head gear by including some heads from the Perry’s WOTR sets. I tended to use what I thought were the older style of helmet that seemed to match some of the other images that I had seen on the internet. I also mixed up the shields. The references that I had seen referred to ‘targes’ or shields made from ox or deer hide over a wooden base and decorated with nails or painted with a basic design. To be fair, none of the references showed a shield with a large boss. However, when I google ‘targe’ there were a number of examples of targes with a boss. Most of these were definitely of Scottish origin, but as I have previously noted, there was a great deal of Scottish influence on the Irish troops. Again, although most of the references showed the Targes as being quite small, there were other pictures that showed a larger targe in use. I had also been told that the Irish used Wicker shields. I could only find one reference to this and it seemed to be regarding an earlier period and in respect of the lower ‘caste’ of warriors, not the Lords, so I discounted their use for my troops

The video above will give you a great deal of information regarding the Irish Targe and for those of you interested in wider Irish history, I would thoroughly recommend that you have a look at his channel.

So the three photos above the video link show the first six of my Irish Lords assembled and ready for painting. The picture above shows painting in progress. I decided to paint the horses as either ‘greys’ or light brown. This was a nod in the direction of the Connemara pony, which are descendants of the smaller Irish Hobby pony, around at the time of the WOTR. However, the real reason that I chose these colours is that I wanted the units of Irish Cavalry to look very different to my standard WOTR light cavalry. It also is an indication of my poor sense of humour – they really are Light ( coloured) cavalry. Incidentally, the horses are probably a bit too large but I wasn’t going to try to source smaller ponies!

The Riders were fairly straight forward to paint. I used army painter plate mail for the armour and helmets. I tended towards Yellow Ochre for the under shirts and the shields were painted in Burnt Red, Reflex Green, Red Leather or Dark Blue and ‘dotted’ with either gold or silver for the designs. I went a bit mad on the cushions, painting a diamond or tartan design on them just to add even more colour to the figures.

The basing was completed using my usual method – I’ve covered this in many of my previous blogs. So with six cavalry finished, I needed to get on with the next six lords and the four ‘horse boys’ that would support them. I then realised that I would need a Leader…. You will have to wait for the next installment o see how I solved these challenges!

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ARCANE SCENERY

You can see the range of miniatures that we think are suitable to for the Wars of the Roses, along with the rest of our Never Mind The Bill Hooks range here:

NEVER MIND THE BILL HOOKS!

You can find all the Vallejo Model colour paints here. If you don’t want to browse, just enter the paint number into the shop search bar;

VALLEJO PAINTS

You can find Gamers grass here:

GAMERS GRASS

If you need Milliput or other fillers, click here:

FILLERS

Happy Modelling!