Castellum limes romanum

Started on a castellum limes (border fort) for my KoM romans the other day. Cutting the foam which will make the turf embankment walls. Will be shaping the foam when I get back after the holiday.

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The boards are 6 inch by 12 inch, one of which was sawed into 6 inch squares (not entirely evenly.) The foam is 1 inch thick polystyrene insulation, cut from a 2x2ft sheet. It is doubled up to make embankments of 2 inches height, which will get a 2 inch pallisade wall (made from bamboo skewers) on top. This will let it act as a castle in seige scenarios. Two corner towers, a gate-wall, and two side walls. The tower corners will be just open fighting platforms, since the towers in seige games are the same height as the walls.


The fort is being based off the mileforts of the Hadrian era Roman cumbrian coastal defenses, such as milefortlet21. With the barracks space built right up against the embankment wall. (Which should make for a good ā€˜stepā€™ to hold unit bases up). With a fair bit of reinterpretation to fit the KoW castle rules. the end result will probably not look very roman, but should be generic enough for use by any of the KoW factions. with a few scatter terrain small houses inside would probably also be able to double as a small fortified village for a vanguard game.

of course, i did hit my first snag, in that i misremembered the heights of the KoW castle partsā€¦ they were level 5 (5 inches) not 4ā€¦ so now i either need to get more foam to add an extra layer, or otherwise figure out how to give an extra inch of height. i have a spare 12inch by 12 inch section of pink foam, but that would leave either the gate or walls short. i might have to reduce the depth of the gate foam sections a bit, and make it up with some other visual feature in the back. or just buy another 2ft square of foam.

(note on pronunciation, since latin is not a common language: you pronounce every letter. so it is kas-tel-lum li-mes ro-ma-num. translates as ā€œsmall border fort of the romansā€, but that should be obvious. Castellum is the diminutive of Castra, the roman term for military camps, forts, and castlesā€¦ which for them were all pretty much the same thing anyway. since the legions usually fortified their campsites, and those camps usually became the built up fortifications that later cultures called castles.)

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bit of an update. this project wound up on holdā€¦ largely because of various other things in my life taking up more time. with the COVID-19 crisis though, i now find myself with a lot more time on my hands than i wanted so i figure iā€™ll try to tackle this again.

there will be a few tweaks though. My Kingdoms of Men army ended up with a desert basing theme and matching backstory, so turf and timber doesnā€™t quite fit them anymore. that said, i wound up with a Mantic Orc army starter set thanks to a tournament i was able to attend earlier this year (where i placed dead last, but hey, i had fun and got a prize anyway.) so this will instead become a somewhat more genetic turf&timber castle i can use with my Orcs and eventually my Northern Alliance. the basic castle plan remains the same, iā€™ll just not be getting as nitpicky about making it all look straight and well built.

i also found these guides (from the LOTR miniatures game) for making palisade walls and gates, which i plan to adapt to the design iā€™m doing.
Rohan Palisade Wall
Rohan Towers and Gate
Palisade Fort

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bit of progress today. apologies for not having taken pics during part of it, iā€™ll try to get more when i work on the corner sections to show my method.

so today i shaped my foam for the wall and gate section. just a simple slope on one side, with some trimming to avoid overhangs or large ledges. sadly this is the stage i forgot to take pics of. iā€™m going to have to do some extra work on the corner bits so iā€™ll show you methodology then. but the basics are i stacked the layers, lined up the sides as best i could, and scored an angle with a progressive-blade boxcutter knife. then i used the baseboard as a straight edge to score out a line across the length of the foam. the lower layer had a smaller area to cut off that the top, but thatā€™ll leave me some useful offcuts for later. then with those guides i cut each layer with the knife into the slope needed. once the two layers were each done, i stacked them and trimmed them where needed, as well as sliced off any ragged bits (sadly my knife is starting to get a bit dull)
once i had the shape i wanted, i glued them together. if not for COVID-19 i would have gone out and found some proper contact cement, but being at home and the town in lockdown, i had to settle for elmerā€™s white glue. it wonā€™t stick quite as solidly but iā€™ve rarely had issues with it before, it just takes hours to dry.
you can see the results here, though largely blocked by the stuff iā€™m using to weigh them down (to ensure there isnā€™t any notable gaps)

the corner pieces iā€™d trimmedā€¦ then i realized that with my change of plan in the design (more on that in a second) i would need to not only trim them again in a different way, but also cut down their size to a fairly large degree, in order to make them meet up to the wall sections correctly.
so for now they are sitting waiting to be worked on.

while waiting on the wall layers to dry, i started trimming my ā€˜logsā€™ā€¦ these are just wood skewers, about 10 inches log. i measured out 4 inches for the tip, and cut the remainder in halfā€¦ so i could give the palisade wall some crenelations for a bit of realism. (as these gaps in the top of the wall allowed troops inside to fight with bows, spears ,and so on while letting them duck back behind cover.)


i saved a couple to use as guides, and started cutting skewers, as i am going to need a lot of these.

now, i said iā€™d changed my designā€¦ basically, iā€™ve decided to go with a simplier and easier to build design. the wall sections have a flat side and a sloped side. before iā€™d hoped to build some buildings on the flat side and put the wall atop the sloped sideā€¦ but that seems less and less likely, so instead iā€™m flipping it aroundā€¦ the flat side will face out now, and be behind the palisade wall, like they planted the logs for the wall, and then piled dirt up behind it to create an embankment. which is how some forts were built in the iron age and early middle ages, especially if they had to be built quickly.

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Loving it. i have been mulling over a Dun style hill fortification myself