From NoelW: A scrap of the past: Rousell’s Sandhill (41 points)

Daylight is failing. Moonlight is fractured by dark fingers of the forest. Somewhere ahead we’ll find Rousell’s Sandhill, and there we should recall the next step of our route home.

The trees part. A misty clearing opens ahead. Is it the sandhill at last? It’s hard to tell in this peculiar half-light. I send my sergeant to scout ahead.

There are shadows in the gloom, and no word from my sergeant, who seems to have gone the way of all sergeants. One of the shadows moves out of the trees, a huge mass of darkness looming towards us. We raise our pistols.

Four ghostly horsemen rear from the shadowy mass. Their costumes reek of another time, with feathers and flounces, their leader garbed in a quaint floppy hat.

The phantom horsemen gallop towards us, a ragged flag of Scotland fluttering around them, a tattered bundle slung between them.

“Fire!” I remember to cry.

As it turns out, some of our guns were actually loaded. Bullets rip into the shadows.

A voice cries out, a voice that sounds somehow familiar.

The horsemen vanish as the bullets rattle through them, their bundle falling to the ground at our feet. Unsurprisingly, that bundle has a familiar face. The man is dead. The ghostly fiends have riddled him with lead.

In his fist, he grips a scrap of parchment, a torn page which appears to be some sort of personal history:

“much of his biography has been lost to us, redacted by the red pencil of Time, making it difficult to determine what may now be relied upon, and what may be no more than rumour.

Earl Stoons of Aberbernarna was so-called, it is said, because he would habitually ‘url stones at his neighbours, whom, he claimed, were trespassers on his estate.

That estate was 90% bog, and 10% peaty moorland, the particular king of land designed by the universe to inspire depression, Drenched in the claggy mists of the Highlands, in that purpose the universe is generally successful. Any buildings erected upon bogland depress the sodden ground, sinking slowly into a peaty grave, gradually declining, to be reduced to little more than the foundations for yet another storey.

Year after year Earl Stoons built new storeys to his house, only to watch them sink into the mire, never managing to build more than two storeys before the lowest vanished into the bog. Invariably, as it was sucked into the mud, so also sank his vast supplies of whisky, his reserves of haggis, many of his servants, most of his contemporary clothing (leaving nothing but antique costumes in the family museum) and all of his self-respect.

So powerful was this erosive malaise that it corroded even the very language of the Scots. Letters, sounds and whole syllables disappeared into the sucky muddiness of the Scottish miasma. You’ve only to read a few lines of Robbie Burns’ poetry to experience it. (For example, that poet’s original name turns out to have been Roberta Heartburns). So when Earl Stoons’ illustrious ancestor, the Marquis of Montrose, died, and his heritage passed down the line, by the time it reached Stoons both the T and the N had disappeared into Scotch Mist, leaving him only the title “the Marquis of Morose”.

The military record of the Marquis remains more than uncertain, to say the least. He was probably involved in the Monmouth Rebellion, but it’s not exactly clear on which side. Possibly both. He almost fought for the loyalists in the War of Jenkin’s Knee, the War of the Four-Cornered Hat, the War of the Badger’s Sandbags and the Skirmish at Horseradish Bottom, and he was probably the cause of the War of the Unexpected Musketball.

However, he did make quite an impression on the battlefield, as he had a very fetching collection of hats [and here the manuscript breaks off]

And as it does, the mist, too, clears and we see that, yes, indeed, we’ve found our way to Rousell’s Sandhill. Its familiar shape reminds us of – sand! sand! We’d come here from the sandy sand of Sander’s Sand-dunes – oh no, we need that wretched balloon again. I feel air-sick.

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Okay – so I still don’t have any 1660s+ figures (although I’m getting tempted by recent articles in Wargames Illustrated) so I have to come up with another cheat. These are two vignette command bases of the Marquis of Morose, hero of the Scots in and around 1660-1690 (coincidentally), dressed in the antiquated style of the period of the Marquis of Montrose because the rest of his clobber was lost in the bogs of his homeland.

The figures are from Wargames Foundry, picked up in one of their sales. They are certainly not the most stylish figures produced by that firm, but they’re reasonable and paint up quite nicely.

I’m not sure of it’s ok to give the flag of the king of Scotland to a cornet (rather than use it as a Standard, carried by an infantry ensign) but I like it. I’m also aware that the flags carried by ECW cavalry were boringly small. However, Montrose was certainly flamboyant and fond of the dramatic gesture, so that’s my justification for such a flag, unhistorical as it may be.

Score: 4 x 28mm cavalry and one flag: 41 points

Noel, it is time you got a book deal, or a better therapist. These guys are cool and appear to have found a dry bit of land. 

Martin