I saw reconstructions of pylon buildings with huge flagpoles in front of them, and so made two flagpoles out of chopsticks and set them into Milliput-lined holes as you see here. Unfortunately, I later saw other reconstructions pictured from different angles, and these showed the flagpoles set into recesses at the bottom of the walls themselves, rather than straight into the ground as I have modelled. Oh well. The flags themselves are made out of cloth soaked in superglue (see banners).

I have never seen a picture of a building like this one, so it could be that the design is largely fanciful. The front entrance wall, with its sloping walls and towers and slit-windows, is just like pylons one sees in reconstructions of ancient Egyptian towns, but these pylons are really just gateways in long walls, astride roads, and not part of self-contained enclosed buildings like this. A model like this, though, is easier to use and store.

This close-up shot gives you a better idea of the effect of the paint job. You can also see one of my modifications to the Hirst Arts design – a vertical wall that offers support to the tower, which would otherwise has been left hanging in a rather unconvincing way.

As with the other models, I had some problem getting the varnish on the base to dry matt. I found that on the flagstones I could scrub away the gloss using a stiff brush loaded with a mix of plaster and brown paint. It scoured the gloss away rather than coating it.

Sitting on my shelf for years were some resin castings by Grendel. One was sold the “Temple of Horus” but was really just a nice sitting statue of the god, and a bit of wall. I decided to put this to use, by making it part of a ruined temple building. An L-shape seemed more tactically interesting than a rectangle. The base board is hardboard again, and all the non-resin bits are plaster castings by me, based mostly on Hirst Arts moulds.

I made a section of wall with three rows of four stones all in one piece, to speed things up. Sometimes I cast this full-thickness, and sometimes half-thickness. Casting it half-thickness had two advantages. One was that it hardened in the mould a lot quicker and so could be removed earlier, and the other was that I could glue two castings back-to-back for a full-thickness bit of wall with texture on both sides. You can see both results in this picture. Half way up the picture on the left are some double-sided bits, and the outline of one single full-thickness casting is clearly visible in the wall towards the top right of the picture. I think I would do it all using half-thickness castings now, but I was learning this on the job. One can always claim that the less-textured bits are where the original plaster hasn’t fallen off.

I haven’t represented every last bit of displaced masonry. I have for convenience imagined that other bits of stone have been looted by local builders. What fallen masonry I have included is placed in tactically useful places, with wargames in mind, although I regret gluing down that little block behind the square plinth and bottom centre of the picture. It makes it hard to stand a figure behind the plinth. Learn from my mistakes.

You may notice that there are two distinct textures and colours on the base outside the building. This is because I had a nightmare trying to get a matt finish. I had used a mastic gun to do a lot of gap filling and gluing. For instance, I glued the back-to-back sections of stonework together this way. It makes a durable bond, and the gaps get filled all in one process. However, I made the mistake of using mastic to help texture the ground. Do not do this. It may seem quick and easy, but you may find as I did that getting varnish to dry matt on this surface is next to impossible. I tried five coats of increasingly rare and expensive varnish. Sometimes the whole coat was glossy. Sometimes a coat might dry mostly matt, with just glossy spots, but the same varnish used the next day, and stirred every bit as much would dry bizarrely and infuriatingly glossy. I have never had much luck with matt varnish, and have never found one that dries consistently matt. Eventually, I gave in and covered over my sharply-detailed dry-brushed and shaded base with a very matt mix of plaster and poster paint. The effect is matt but bland.

This building is completely made up, and is based on the front façade, which is a Grendel casting. The base is skip-rescued board, the side walls are hardboard covered with castings of stones (half thickness where the pillars are, full thickness above and below). The removable roof is just a slab of card, textured with mastic (not varnished!). I put in a skylight not just for illumination, but also it makes it much easier to get the roof off. The paint job again suggests a spruced-up but past-its-prime building. By a wonderful coincidence, the stones on the façade match those of the side walls exactly (they are both one inch by half an inch).

In style this building feels more like one from the later period when the Macedonians and Romans were building in the Egyptian style.

I had another Grendel entranceway. I decided that as an entranceway alone it would never get used. What was its purpose? An entranceway in a wargame can only be used right at the edge of a table, where it will inevitably get knocked off. Detailed models like this for role-play gaming are going too far. It became the front wall of an overgrown ruin. The stones in the resin casting were half the size of the Hirst Arts stones, so I had to score into the plaster castings a lot more stone edges, using a ruler and a tungsten spike (see tools).