Before I decided to make custom designed terrain boards for my Boxtel game, I needed to find a way to represent the many drainage ditches that covered the battlefield around Schyndel. There was several feet of ditches to be made and therefore they needed to be relatively inexpensive. The ditches also needed to be fairly narrow to fit in with the ground scale represented. Finally the ditches needed to be flexible, as those I was modelling were not straight. This post illustrates the solution that I came up with I came up with;

Obviously ditches should be below the surface of the table, consequently for my purposes an illusion has to be created. I decided that the best way to do this was to assume that the ditches were lined with bushes. This assumption enabled me to design the ditches based on the Javis Flexible Hedging product;

Link

Placing the hedge on its side, I then used a soldering iron to melt the centre of the piece – as shown in this before and after shot;

In order to give the pieces some weight, so that theywould stay in place – I then glued the ends to two pence pieces and covered them with flock and gravel.

The whole was then painted appropriately. These photos show the finished product in play – not as good as my custom built terrain boards but a lot better than chalk marks on the cloth!

Some Dutch ditches today;

Finally a contemporary cartoon of the Duke of York battling to escape one of these pesky ditches in May 1794, when his army was all but surrounded;