Dark Ages Buildings

Dark Ages buildings are pretty easy to build or collect. I made one from foamboard and cardboard (shown here) and you can find plans for buildings knocking about on the web. Or you can buy them from several online stores, with lots of options including printed paper downloads, mdf kits, resin kits and even pre-painted versions. There's something to suit every pocket and they can be used in a variety of games, from Saga to Warhammer and probably lots of others in between. I recently added to my collection with a couple of purchases from warbases. I picked up a timber barn and a viking longhouse for the princely sum of seven english pounds.

The barn is the most elaborate in terms of mdf laser etched timber bits. It comes in a kit form, there are no instructions included but, as you can see, it's a pretty straight forward jigsaw puzzle. I did a quick dry run and found that the building holds together with no glue! That's good solid engineering. The viking longhouse came in a similar kit but with less details etched on and did require glue to hold it together. In any event, I glued both buildings together and set them aside to dry. It took me about five minutes per building, clearly not designed by Ikea.

The next step was to add a little texture. To the viking longhouse I added some basic timber detail in the shape of wooden coffee stirrers, ideal in size and width as you can see in the picture. Both builidngs also received a texture coating to represent a rough render (as in wattle and daub). This was a mix of diluted pva glue, sand and static grass. I just smeared it on to the walls with a coffeee stirrer. While it was drying, the local building inspector came round to size it up.

All in all, I was pretty happy with my purchase. The timber barn, with pre-etched detail, was quickest to assemble . The longhouse was quick too, adding timber framework extended the build time but I thought it was worth the extra effort. My original "grub hut" turned out to be a bit on the large side, but no matter, perhaps it's owned by a particularly wealthy Saxon family.

When the thatched roofs are added and all the painting is done, the buildings work together much better. I painted the walls in an earth/yellow colour and the thatch roofs in a grey - if you google thatched cottage you will see that the colour is nearer to grey than the fresh yellow of newly cut straw. Working from brown fur was a pain, I would shop around for a grey/tan fur for future projects. It's also a little bit too shaggy in bits, but overall I am quite pleased. Looking at them here I think they would also work well in a winter setting, they have that dusting of snow appearance. Quite fitting for a viking settlement I reckon.