The grandeur of the Wallace Monument has inspired a former Bannockburn man to build a replica of the building during lockdown.
Michael Lenton, whose parents Tangee and Richard Lenton live in Carseview, put the model made of polystyrene together over a couple of months. His brother David lives in Broomridge with wife Lindsay.
Thirty-nine-year-old Michael, who now lives in Cork City in Ireland, estimates that he has spent around 50 hours on the project.
He said: “I have always been fascinated by the building.
“When I was growing up I could see the Wallace Monument out of my bedroom window.
“Admittedly it’s quite far away from Carseview, but it was still unmistakeable.”
Michael, a former pupil of Dollar Academy who went on to study furniture design at Loughborough University School of Art and Design, has been making plastic model kits since he was a boy and recalled spending many hours in the, now closed, ‘Model Engineer’ model shop in Stirling’s Baker Street.
He is now manager of a hobby shop in Cork City.
Michael said his Wallace Monument model is slightly smaller than 1:76 scale and uses expanded polystyrene, pva glue, epoxy putty, wall filler, plastic card, various acrylic paints and a metal wargaming figure for the statue of William Wallace.
He added: “I’ve been making plastic model kits all my life like Airfix and Tamiya. It’s mostly a very relaxing and therapeutic hobby.
“Many fantastic model makers would come into the shop in Cork to buy materials prior to our lockdowns here and they really inspired me to start my own project.
“It’s taken a couple of months. I might work on it for an hour, leave it a week and go back to it. I think the total hours taken would be around 50 hours.
“As for making it and getting the size right, without having to calculate every scale length, I found the scans of the original plans from the Wallace Monument website.
“I cleaned them up a bit in a photo editing program, then printed them out at the size I wanted, as a poster, so I could just measure the plans and transfer those measurements to the polystyrene.”
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Michael went on: “The scale was meant to be 1:76, which is also known as 00 scale, which is what the UK and Ireland use as the main model railway scale.
“But as that would make my model 90cm tall, which also needs to sit on a model hill, I made it a little smaller at 75cm tall instead.”
