Great Polish Map of Scotland

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Aerial view of the snow-covered Great Polish Map of Scotland , December 2017

The Great Polish Map of Scotland (also Mapa Scotland from Polish mapa Szkocji ) is a 50 × 40 m relief model of Scotland (with the exception of the Orkney and Shetland Islands ) located west of Eddleston in Scotland on a scale of 1: 10,000. It is by far the largest topographic relief model of its kind in the United Kingdom and the largest three-dimensional map of a country in the world. It was created in the 1970s and has been a listed building ( category B ) since 2012 .

history

prehistory

Barony Castle , 2008

The creation of the Great Polish Map of Scotland goes back to the Pole Jan Tomasik. Born in Kraków , he started out as a bricklayer . After the German invasion of Poland , he was drafted into the Polish Army . After being wounded he came over Hungary first to France , where he commanded by General Stanisław Maczek as a soldier of the Polish Armed Forces in the West continued to fight against the Germans. After being wounded again, he was taken to Scotland. In 1942 he married a Scottish nurse. In the same year he was assigned to the newly established 1st Panzer Division, with which he worked from July 1944, inter alia. fought in Normandy , Belgium , the Netherlands and finally in Germany . In 1945 he returned to Scotland and became a successful hotelier there .

In 1968 Tomasik acquired Black Barony (also called Barony Castle ) in Eddleston, south of Edinburgh . Parts of it dating back to the 16th century, the building, which was expanded several times, was converted into a hotel in 1926. In the Second World War it was confiscated and served the Polish exile forces first as headquarters for Maczeks 10th Armored Cavalry Brigade , and later as a training base for staff officers . When Tomasik took over the property, however, it was in poor condition, so extensive renovation work was necessary. He did most of the masonry work himself. His daughter Catherine and her husband Marek Raton took over the management of the hotel.

General Maczek, like many Polish exiles, stayed in Scotland after the war. The two men were deeply friends until Tomasik's death in 1991. Tomasik also provided Maczek with a room in the Black Barony Hotel in which he could spend the summer with his family . To what extent Maczek had influence on Tomasik's idea of ​​building a true-to-scale relief representation of Scotland is unclear.

Planning and construction

Barony Castle with the Great Polish Map of Scotland in the foreground

In the early 1970s, relations between the UK and Poland were so good, despite the Cold War , that Tomasik was able to present his idea to Professor Mieczyslaw Klimaszewski. Klimaszewski was head of the Geography Institute at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, a member of the Polish State Council and, since 1961, a member of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina . He made contact with Kazimierz Trafas , who had just completed his doctorate, and who, together with his colleague Roman Wolnik , traveled to Scotland for the first time in 1974 and took over the project management. Trafas took the required data from an atlas published by the Edinburgh-based publisher Collins Bartholomew .

Trafas decided to have a smaller one made of plaster on a scale of 1: 500,000 parallel to the large model , which could be exhibited in the castle hotel. An electronically controlled manufacturing machine was used for the first time in the manufacture of this model. The finished model, from which plastic reliefs were also molded , was brought to Scotland in four parts. Its whereabouts are unclear.

The large relief was to be created immediately south of the Barony Castle Hotel . After the building site bulldozed had been, were using a Cartesian coordinate system the coastline and three first contour lines transferred to the building and up to the appropriate height bricked up . The coastline was half a meter above the ground, while in reality the contour lines corresponded to 300 m, 600 m and 900 m above sea level. The inside of the borders was poured with concrete.

In the following years, the team was supported by several other employees from the university, Polish exchange students and some employees of the hotel. They hand-sculpted the details of the terrain out of concrete, with the mountain peaks previously marked with vertical bars. In 1976, the work on the relief was essentially completed, and the surrounding basin was also completed by 1979.

In the same year, Catherine and Marek Raton left the hotel. For health reasons, Jan Tomasik had to retire from business life in 1981 and the management of the hotel group was passed on to his son Jan Tomasik jun. submit.

After a fire in the hotel in 1981, the focus was on rebuilding it. For example, an originally planned metal footbridge on which visitors could have strolled across the Great Polish Map of Scotland was never realized. In 1985 the hotel was closed and sold. In the following years Jan Tomasik jun. in vain to win over investors to continue the hotel business. Jan Tomasik Sr. died in 1991. The relief was forgotten.

Rediscovery and restoration

Part of the enclosing wall with the model of the Outer Hebrides before repairs (2011)
View over Scotland from the English-Scottish border (2012)
View over the Firth of Forth to Fife (2011)
Ben Nevis , the UK's tallest mountain (2012)

In the mid-1990s, the structure was badly damaged by the effects of the weather, especially frost , and was practically completely overgrown.

In 1994 Kazimierz Trafas came to Edinburgh for a conference and told an architect by the name of David Cameron about the relief that he had built for Tomasik twenty years earlier. Cameron promised to look into the matter. Two years later, engineer Keith Burns, who was attending a conference at the (now reopened) Barony Castle Hotel , accidentally discovered the relief in the thick undergrowth. In the course of his research he came across Cameron. Together with a few fellow campaigners, they founded a citizens' initiative for the restoration and preservation of the building under the name Mapa Scotland . In the same year, work began on removing the vegetation and removing debris. In 2012 Mapa Scotland was recognized as a non-profit organization. In August of the same year, the Great Polish Map of Scotland was added to the Scottish List of Monuments under Category B.

In September 2012, at the initiative of SNP MP Christine Grahame, a debate about the map took place in the Scottish Parliament , which was also translated into Polish in the live stream. It was the first time that a debate in the Scottish Parliament had been translated simultaneously into a language other than Scots or Gaelic . In her motion, Grahame campaigned for Parliament to support the project. The Great Polish Map of Scotland is not only “a remarkable example of topographical landscape modeling using pioneering surveying and construction techniques”, but “also reminds us of the important role the Polish armed forces played in the defense of Scotland in World War II and is a token of thanks To the Scottish people for the hospitality and friendship which the Polish people enjoyed not only during the war years but also in the decades that followed ”.

After sufficient funding had been secured, the actual restoration could begin in 2014.

First, 250  tons of rubble had to be removed, some of which were reused for the construction of new, stable foundations. When the relief was built in the 1970s, numerous disused tin cans from the hotel were used as filling material, which were now weathered and had to be replaced. A total of 14 m³ or 34 tons of frost-proof concrete and mortar had been poured in by 2017  . The helpers also laid 300 m of pipes and sealed the bottom of the pool with bentonite .

In addition to the actual restoration, a fence was built around the pool for safety reasons. In addition, wheelchair-accessible paths have been laid out, benches and information boards have been set up and a new steel observation tower has been erected, which gives visitors a view of the model, which corresponds to a view from 45  km of the real Scotland.

Most of the work was done by volunteers who were temporarily supported by the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Scotland ( The Royal Highland Fusiliers ).

In 2017 the relief was laser scanned by the Scottish monument protection authority Historic Environment Scotland in order to create an interactive 3D model from the data obtained .

On April 12, 2018, the restored building was inaugurated in the presence of Polish and Scottish government representatives.

description

The relief is about 50 × 40  m in size and is located in an approximately oval, 1.5 m deep basin with a 142 m long, brick outer wall and an area of ​​1590  m² . The land area shown alone covers 780 m². The scale is 1: 10,000 with a five-fold exaggeration . The highest mountain in Scotland, Ben Nevis with a real height of 1343 m above sea level , rises in the model 67 cm above the water surface or 117 cm above the bottom of the water basin.

The representation is not oriented to the north , but rotated about 90 ° counterclockwise compared to reality.

The basin can be flooded with water from the nearby river Dean Burn for a realistic representation of the coasts and islands , whereby the "sea level" is 50 cm above the bottom of the basin. Before the restoration, this was only possible temporarily as the water seeped into the porous subsoil . The model also has a pipe system to be able to simulate the rivers with real water. This pipe system was already installed when the relief was erected, but was only brought into a fully functional state during the restoration.

After completion in the 1970s, the surface of the relief was coated with synthetic resin and then painted in color. The basic color was gray. Forests are shown in green, larger cities in light brown, important roads in red and bodies of water in blue. The water was also originally colored blue. However, only traces of the painting, which had been renewed in 1981, were left until the start of the restoration. Today the model is painted a uniform light gray.

Web links

Commons : Great Polish Map of Scotland  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Barony Castle Hotel, The Great Polish Map of Scotland (entry in the Scottish list of monuments)
  2. ↑ Darren Boyle: Volunteers restore giant 40-year-old concrete map of Scotland in grounds of a castle to its former glory two decades after it fell into disrepair on Dailymail.co.uk , April 12, 2019
  3. ↑ a b Leszek Mazan, translated by Wojciech Szczerek: Jan Tomasik, the man who built Scotland on www.mapascotland.org, July 18, 1981
  4. ^ Mieczyslaw Klimaszewski on the Leopoldina website
  5. ↑ a b c Janusz Szewcjuk: Scotland in Scotland (Szkocja w Szkocji) (archived version)
  6. ↑ Debate to ensure Borders map is not consigned to history on www.bordertelegraph.com, July 3, 2012
  7. ↑ Members' Business: The Great Polish Map of Scotland (broadcast in English and Polish) on the Scottish Parliament website
  8. ↑ Scottish Parliament Motion: September 19, 2012 at www.mapascorland.org
  9. ↑ Business Bulletin, May 29, 2012, Section F on the Scottish Parliament website
  10. ↑ Progress Report, March, 2019 at www.mapascotland.org
  11. ↑ a b Progress Report at February 2018 on www.mapascotland.org
  12. ↑ Thanks lads! (and lass), of No. 2 Scots, Royal Regiment of Scotland at www.mapascotland.org
  13. ↑ Map Brings Scottish-Polish Links To Life at www.historicenvironment.scot, September 4, 2017
  14. ↑ Restoration completed. Formal opening of the map, April 12, 2018 on www.mapascotland.org
  15. ↑ The Great Polish Map of Scotland at www.baronycastle.com
  16. ^ Relief map celebrates bond between Scotland and Poland at www.berwickshirenews.co.uk, 10 August 2018
  17. ↑ Story of the Map at www.mapascotland.org

Coordinates: 55 ° 42 ′ 43 ″  N , 3 ° 13 ′ 0 ″  W.