The Great Polish Map of Scotland
The what? Yes, there is indeed such a thing. Not only of Scotland, but in Scotland. I didn’t know it existed, though I’ve been here longer than it has, until it featured in a BBC News web article this morning.
The story is this: a Polish serviceman stationed in Scotland in WWII stayed on at the end of the war and in the seventies found himself running a hotel, the Barony Castle Hotel, in the village of Eddleston in the south of Scotland, which is about seventeen miles down from Edinburgh on the A703.
To thank the Scottish people for the years of hospitality he’d enjoyed (and presumably, as a hotelier, given) he decided to build in the grounds of the hotel a large concrete map of Scotland, which, with the aid of other Poles, he did. And there it stands to this day, albeit requiring frequent maintenance, on account of the weather in Scotland being, well, Scottish.
This is what it looks like in real life - or at any rate, Bing Maps’ version of real life:
So what would it look like in MSFS? Having checked that it could in fact be seen in the World Map, I decided to go and take a look. But which plane to choose to do it? Ooh, that’s a hard one:
In fact, the Great Polish Map of Scotland has come out quite well for what I presume is the stock satellite imagery:
Though the Barony Castle Hotel itself hasn’t done quite so well. I have to say I’m looking forward to seeing if MSFS 2024 is any better at this sort of thing.
I decided to take a closer look. Obviously there are limits to what you can expect but this actually turned out better than I, at any rate, was anticipating.
Not what I was planning to be doing in MSFS today but fun nonetheless.