Scale: 1:12. A model of a wooden pontoon. It’s a planked and framed, flat-bottomed, straight-sided, and decked fore and aft. The frames have been individually made up rather than formed from a single piece of timber. Ropes are attached to these frames and secured to the deck and the frames themselves divide the pontoon into six equal-sized compartments. Perhaps the ropes were for tethering horses during transit. It is fitted with twelve rope thole fittings for sweeps, or oars, six each side, and the model comes with five sweeps and the lower part of an anchor. The Rotunda catalogue mentions that the model was equipped with boat hooks, which we no longer have.

At a scale of 1:12 the actual pontoon would have been almost fourteen metres in length. For a model made sometime during the nineteenth century, in form it doesn’t look dissimilar to the double-ended landing craft from the Second World War.