Rebuilding the Tote Board and Bringing Living History Back to Barnton Bunker
There are rooms in Barnton Bunker that have been silent for decades.
Rooms where decisions were made in seconds. Where information moved fast, and the people handling it were often barely out of their teens. Where the machinery of Cold War defence ran continuously, day and night, beneath the trees of Edinburgh's Barnton Quarry.
Slowly, piece by piece, those rooms are coming back.
The board that tracked Britain's skies
Tote Board in its original position
On the wall of the operations room, directly opposite the officers' area, there was once a display that served as the living pulse of the bunker's air defence work.
It was a manually operated tote board, a system of tiles slotted in from behind, updated in real time by operators working on the other side of the wall, unseen by the officers reading the information on the front.
Alan outside Barnton Bunker
Alan Treloar, who served at Barnton Bunker as a 19-year-old RAF National Serviceman in 1955, remembers it clearly. He describes the mechanism as resembling a wall of Venetian blinds, tiles clipped into place using metal fastenings, updated continuously as new information came through from across Scotland's radar network.
What those tiles showed was critical. Squadron numbers. Airbase locations. Aircraft availability. How many fighter jets were ready, and how quickly they could be scrambled. Every airfield in the Scottish sector had its own row: Leuchars, Dyce, Turnhouse, and others, each one updated as the picture changed.
In a defence network measured in minutes, that board was the difference between a coordinated response and chaos.
Reconstructing what the records left behind
The original tote board did not survive. Along with much of the bunker's original equipment and fittings, it was lost over decades of abandonment and fires in the 1990s before the restoration project began.
But history rarely disappears completely.
Working from archive photographs, detailed historical research, and the first-hand testimony of veterans including Alan himself, and the team at Barnton Bunker undertook a careful reconstruction not a stylised interpretation, but a considered rebuild of how the board would have appeared during the operational years of the early 1950s.
The finished piece was printed onto canvas and hand-stretched over a timber frame. It now hangs exactly where the original once stood, in the same room, on the same wall, facing the same operations floor where Alan and his colleagues once tracked the skies above Scotland.
It is not a replica in the decorative sense. It is evidence physical, visible proof of how this place once worked.
Watch the build here.
A different kind of Edinburgh attraction
Edinburgh draws visitors for its history, its architecture, and its stories. Most of those stories play out above ground, on the Royal Mile, inside the castle, along the closes and wynds of the Old Town.
Barnton Bunker is something different. It is underground, hidden, and entirely removed from the city most visitors experience. What makes it compelling is precisely what it is: a real Cold War command centre, built in secrecy, staffed by real people, and now restored by volunteers who understood that this history was worth saving.
Read our 5 star reviews here, fully underground, it offers one of the most genuinely distinctive things to do in Edinburgh.
Come underground this Heritage Week
Tours running every weekend. Each tour is guided, immersive, and built around the real history of the site, from its origins as part of Britain's ROTOR radar network, to its role as Scotland's Regional Seat of Government, to the volunteers working today to ensure none of it is forgotten.
The tote board is inside. Seventy years of history is inside.
The only way to experience it is to go underground.
Book your tour at barntonbunker.com/book-your-tour
Spaces on each tour are limited and advance booking is strongly recommended.
Want to read more about Alan's return after nearly 70 years? The full story is here: 70 Years Later — Ex-Serviceman Returns to Barnton Bunker
