A WOMAN in Tullibody has spent the last two years painstakingly creating a model of what the town looked like at the beginning of the 20th century.

Chris Calder, who was a district nurse in the area, decided to create the mini town after talking to patients who were disappointed that the town had changed so much over the years.

The display, which was made out of loft insulation board and can be taken apart, took just over two years to make by Chris who would work tirelessly every day creating the stunning piece of art.

She said: “When I was a nurse I used to have a lot of the elderly patients telling me stories about the village as it used to be basically. If you look around Tullibody today, it has completely changed.

“A lot of them were disappointed that the whole town had been pulled down. There’s only so much left, (building with green dots in the pictures are still remaining) and it’s virtually nothing.

“It took two years to reproduce what the village had been like before 1947 when Clackmannanshire Council decided to rebuild it between then and 1965. It is based on the 1922 street map and photographs that we collected when we set the history group up in 2001.

“It’s such a shame because if you look at villages such as Falkland, which have been renovated post-war, it would look as beautiful as those.”

Based in the Heritage Centre in Tullibody, Chris created the History Group in 2001 without so much as a piece of paper or a photograph. The group then set out to find historical items and have managed to acquire quite a few.

Then-MP Martin O’Neill then decided that the group should have a home before the old bowling club was selected and given to the group by the Clackmannanshire Council as it had been lying for four years unused.

The group moved into the club in the autumn of 2002, although a significant amount of work had to be done on the place due to the state of disrepair it had been left in, including dampness.

Describing the daily effort the model took, Chris said: “I used to get up in the morning and use a little electric band saw and cut a couple of gable ends, then come home at lunch time to glue them together before coming home at night to do a little extra on it.

“It has been very good because some people just can’t visualise the road layouts which have all changed.

“People have started coming in and saying that my dad lived here, my gran lived there etc. It’s very satisfying when that happens.”