The Childhood Museum on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh is a wonderful place. It is free to enter and is set out on several floors, with toys, games, dolls, bicycles etc. etc. from all eras.  Really worth popping in past if you are in the area.

I have now added the photographs of my Pennies I collected at Legoland Windsor  and also retired coins I have bought. LEGO . Thanks to David at UK Pennies for supplying the retired ones that I was missing.

2 retired Pennies I picked up from a coin shop.

Dundee – Verdant Works

Largs – Vikingar

One more added to the collection today. A retired Penny from Edinburgh Castle. I bought this one from eBay. Edinburgh Castle Historic Scotland

I have added 12 more Pennies, thanks again Jorg.

These were added to Glencoe, Highland Wildlife Park, Haven Holidays. loch Lomond Aquarium, Glasgow Science Centre and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

Finally got the picture gallery up with larger pics of my whole collection

I have added 30 more Pennies and updated the photos. Thanks to Jorg  for supplying me with these.

Link added to ukpennies

I have now uploaded the images of the Pennies I collected when visiting Ireland.

You can find them here:  Irish Pressed Pennies

How they are made

An early and common method of coin elongation was by leaving them on a railway track. When a train rolls over a penny, the force is sufficient to cause deformation that flattens and stretches it into an oval, showing only the faintest trace of the original design. Some early railway flattened pennies were then hand engraved with the date and location.

Modern elongated coins are created by inserting a standard, small denomination coin into a small rolling mill consisting of two steel rollers pressed against each other with sufficient force to deform the coin. One of the rollers (called the “die”) is engraved with a design that imprints a new image into the metal as the coin passes through it. The resulting coin is oval-shaped and shows a design corresponding to the design on the die in the mill. Some machines are hand operated, whereas others are fully automatic.

Legality

In the UK, the Coinage Offences Act 1936 prohibited the defacement of any current coins. This was repealed in its entirety by the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981, thus removing the prohibition on coin defacement.