diff --git a/src/modelling/checkpoint.jl b/src/modelling/checkpoint.jl
index 3df5265..b7f617e 100644
--- a/src/modelling/checkpoint.jl
+++ b/src/modelling/checkpoint.jl
@@ -4,7 +4,21 @@ struct BaseColBERT
     tokenizer::Transformers.TextEncoders.AbstractTransformerTextEncoder
 end
 
+function BaseColBERT(checkpoint::String, config::ColBERTConfig)
+    # since Transformers.jl doesn't support local loading
+    # we manually load the linear layer
+    bert_config = Transformers.load_config(checkpoint)
+    bert_state_dict = HuggingFace.load_state_dict(checkpoint)
+    bert_model = HuggingFace.load_model(:bert, checkpoint, :model, bert_state_dict; config = bert_config)
+    linear = HuggingFace._load_dense(bert_state_dict, "linear", bert_config.hidden_size, config.doc_settings.dim, bert_config.initializer_range, true)
+
+    tokenizer = Transformers.load_tokenizer(checkpoint)
+
+    return BaseColBERT(bert_model, linear, tokenizer)
+end
+
 struct Checkpoint
+
     model::BaseColBERT
     doc_tokenizer::Any
     colbert_config::Any