During the war the Barony Castle hotel had served as an officer training college for the Polish forces preparing to defend Scotland and to help to liberate Europe from the Nazis.  After the war many of the soldiers settled in Scotland including General Stanislaw Maczek who had commanded the troops and Jan Tomasik who then became a hotelier in Edinburgh and bought the castle in 1968.  Maczek and Tomasik had become friends and they decided in memory of the Scots’ hospitality and Poland’s part in its defence, to create a great 3D map of Scotland on the site of the tactical map they had once made on the old putting green. In 1975 a group of cartography students from Krakow University led by Kazimierz Trafas, and local volunteers started to construct a huge 60m long and 40m wide pit, to contain the Scottish landscape surrounded by water to represent the sea and with piped water representing the lochs and major rivers.  By 1979 it was not quite complete when a serious fire damaged the hotel and Tomasik sold the hotel.  The map subsequently fell into decay and gradually became overgrown and damaged by harsh winter conditions.  In 2012 a group of enthusiasts formed a new charity called Mapa Scotland to restore the map as a vital historic link to the Polish community and it was formally reopened in April 2018, the 100th anniversary year of Polish independence.
The Polish Map of Scotland is the largest 3D map in the world measuring approximately 50 by 40 metres (160 ft × 130 ft).and almost three times larger than the model of British Columbia in Victoria which is 23m x 12m (74 by 40 ft)   It is true to scale but the altitude scale is exaggerated five times to give an impression of  looking down from space