Hougoumont. Battle of Waterloo 1815. (Hobby Post)

Hougoumont - Battle of Waterloo 1815. (Hobby Post)

Originally scratch built by Chris Dodson and recently reassembled, based and completed by me.

After some dithering, experimentation and good fortune I finally decided not to try and build Hougoumont using parts just from the Airfix La Haye Sainte kit.

Which as regular readers of my blog will know is something I have done with several other Hundred Day's farms starting with Gemioncourt > Quatre Bras Farm > Papelotte > Mont St Jean and ending with LHS itself.

You can see them all here: Nap Buildings

With the confidence gained from most recently tackling Mont St Jean and Papelotte I did fancy taking it on at one point. But then after an initial attempt I realised to get the Gardeners House and the Chateau anything like realistic in terms of windows and doors would take parts from too many Airfix kits to be practical. It would also look too patchwork.

So what to do? Well luckily at the same sort of time I was mulling all this over I was fortunate enough to be able to buy Chris Dodson's wonderful collection of scratch built Napoleonic farms, houses and buildings for the Hundred Days Campaign.

The most recently made lot covered Quatre Bras and the batch before that Ligny. The earliest buildings were from Hougoumont which I have augmented myself to complete the model as shown here.

As I know from my own experience the more of this sort of thing you do the better you get. So whilst Hougoumont is perhaps not quite as accomplished as Chris' later Quatre Bras models it is still pretty impressive.

(I will base & photograph the Quatre Bras & Ligny models in due course and then post a couple of blogs about them.)

My additions to complete the model were:

Open Shed north of Great Barn (Airfix)

Stables south of Great Barn (Airfix - some doors from Chris)

Farmers House between Chateau & Formal Garden (Airfix - some doors & windows from Chris)

Balustrade (Mdf Kit)

The Formal Garden

Both the buildings and the Formal Garden are based on 2mm MDF picture framing backing board. Each half is 50cm x 35cm

Below: Some defending 1/72 scale British Infantry (bought ready painted off ebay) shown for sizing.

The walling for the Formal Garden was made from thin sections of plastic building card (Javis 40b) sandwiched between layers of plastic brick sheeting all glued together using Revell Contact cement. The plastic brick sheeting is made by South Eastern Finecast code number FBS404 available from model railway retailers. Wall buttresses are match sticks.

Below: More 1/72 scale figures in situ. This time Nassau Infantry (painted by Simon Bennison of Painted Napoleonic Armies).

My intention is to use this and the other Napoleonic buildings I have blogged about for wargaming. Hence some compromises have had to be made - one example being the reduction in size of the Formal Garden.

Below: Formal garden at an early stage. Even at 50cm x 35cm it is still under sized.

So that's Hougoumont. Below are a couple of other Waterloo buildings I wanted to briefly cover here as well.

La Belle Alliance

Chris Dodson built it and I just based it. This famous Inn was located pretty much near to where Napoleon spent much of the battle. It is also where Wellington & Blucher linked up at the end of the day.

La Haye Farm

Built by me. Not to be confused with the very well known La Haye Sainte. The farm at La Haye was on Wellington's extreme left near Papelotte.

This was my first experiment using decorators caulk on the barn and outer walls which was a tip from Chris. Barn is Airfix. House is much changed Battlefront in polystone. Thatch created using pva woodglue and static grass with several different colour sprays and final bleached bone dry brush.

Single story, built of cob (clay, gravel & straw) with thatched roofing. So walls could be penetrated by musket balls and fire was a major hazard.

Not as solid a bastion as other farms garrisoned at Waterloo. Held by Nassau troops. On Wellington's left flank in vicinity of Papelotte, Frichermont & Smohain.

Burned down in 1910. Info from Adkin & Weller. Built using what details they provide & my imagination.

Based on a MDF board measuring 25cm x 18cm. Outer walls are plastic building card textured with decorating caulk (ie filler). Caulk also applied to barn walls. Gates and barn (apart from roof) from Chris.

To see more 1/72 scale Waterloo Campaign buildings see here: Nap Buildings

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For appropriate figures in this scale you can view the 1/72 Scale Napoleonic section of my webstore here: Napoleonic 1/72 scale sets

You can view my other 1/72 scale Napoleonic blog articles here: Napoleonic 1/72 scale blog articles

The comments section for my blog is turned off now due to spammers but you can message me using the 'Contact' tab at the top right of the page or click here: Contact

Thanks for taking an interest.

Rupert - Drum & Flag