Bricks To The Past

Meet the team of Lego builders going to great lengths to bring history to life in marvellous detail

WHEN Dan Harris’s Lego recreation of a Scottish Iron Age fort was unveiled at the Ben Nevis Visitor Centre in Fort William, the press coverage stretched as far as China.

But it was a reader’s comment on a newspaper’s website which tickled him the most. “Very good effort – he must have been tearing his hair out getting it done.”

For the record, the 36-year-old’s bare head has nothing to do with the strain of putting together 35,000 bricks in the shape of a 2500-year-old hill fort. In fact, Welsh-born Dan, who now lives in Nethy Bridge, finds building a form of relaxation.

“It’s great to be able to sit down in an evening, put on some music or listen to a podcast, and try to work out how to design or build something,” he says.

He’s not the only one who finds zen in a brick. UK cabinet minister Jeremy Wright has admitted he uses his collection of Lego to de-stress, while scientists in Taiwan have found that building

Lego reduces anxiety in adults. Lego itself

– created in 1947 by a Danish company of the same name, meaning “play well” – launched a new range for adults called

Forma at the end of last year.

But few take it to the level Dan has.

He and a number of colleagues, most notably Simon Pickard and James Pegrum, work under the banner of Brick To The Past, specialising in historythemed creations. In 2015 they built a 16 sq m (172 sq ft) recreation of Hadrian’s Wall, complete with fort, milecastle, victus and even latrine, for the Great Western Brick Show in Swindon. Dan and his fellow builders took an online archaeology course as research, as well as visiting sites around the wall. “Certain things about the wall we know, such as the layout of the forts, but we don’t know others – like, was there crenellation? “There are also questions about its appearance – evidence points to it being limewashed at least on its northern aspect,” explains Dan.

In the end they went with crenellation, but not with limewashing, for The Wall: Rome’s Northern Frontier. It was created in the builders’ free time to raise money 