Border Reivers

The plan
This project is designed to fill the role of systems like DBA and give me an excuse to prepare some armies for the table and play with them without having to commit to a huge number of miniatures for each and the time and expense that would entail.
I am planning to produce about four (maybe more) armies to play Neil Thomas' One Hour Wargames. These armies consist of six elements drawn from a pool of ten so I shall be assembling and painting all ten options (and some extras, more on those later).

The Army
The Border Reivers are another fairly standard army for these rules. Their four infantry units are pike and shotte, they have two units of archers instead of reiters, two swordsmen and finally, two cavalry.

Infantry
I'm starting, as usual, with the 24 pikes. All these miniatures are from Hoka Hey Miniatures. They're a mixture of Scottish and Irish. My Border Reivers army isn't exclusively Border Reivers but an amalgamation of Celtic troublemakers out to annoy my Elizabethans.

For the command figures on the pike bases I chose all the spear-armed miniatures and converted them to standard-bearers by cutting away the spears, drilling their hands and affixing wire pikes. To these I added the three musicians and the Bishop.

The finished pike. I've used tufts for the first (and probably only) time to add some heather to their bases. The historical flags are from 1st Corps, and eBay and the speculative Irn Bru and haggis flags are from Flags of War. Flags of War provided these free on Twitter so I've added them here as well.

Next up, the 'shotte' wings. Since these comprise 32 miniatures I'm painting them in two lots. I'm starting with the shooting poses.

Now for the loading poses that will form the rear rank.

The Border Reivers are getting archers instead of Reiters. Archers don't run out of ammunition.

Two units of six swordsmen.

Two units of cavalry. As with the infantry, I've cut off the lance that one was holding and drilled out his hand for a flag pole.

The commanders.
The General has had his hand drilled to accept a flag pole and is accompanied by two hounds from Alternative Armies.
The Bishop is supported by the two Irish monks.

Here's the complete army.

I've painted a 3ft x 3ft (90cm x 90cm) board especially for this project.

I found some lovely resin artillery emplacements made by Debris of War. They fit my 80mm unit bases exactly.

Some highland cattle from Warbases.

Since heather pollen make such good honey, I decided to get a couple of First Corps resin beehives. They're medieval beehives but I'm sure that won't matter to the bees.