Balnakailly WW2 Community Regeneration Project

Heritage Coordinate Amie was employed to regenerate and manage Balnakailly Rainforest and it’s built heritage. The Balnakailly WW2 Bunker has historic ignificance and is a destination for community members and visitors. Over the years several fires had been lit in the building, it was a littered, uninviting dark space, defaced and without interpretation. Amie secured funding from the Third Sector Interface Mental Health and Wellbeing Fund for a community project to regenerate the space, she recruited local artists Maria Bygrove and Stephen Doak to design interpretation murals for the bunker walls. Several volunteer sessions were held throughout 2026 in which community members cleaned out the bunker and prepared the walls for murals. Maria and Stephen then hosted several sessions with volunteers to complete the murals. Rothesay Academy pupils designed text interpretation and visited in October 2026 to stencil the text in the entrance room using stencils they made in school. All walls have been treated with anti graffiti paint, acrylic covers have been installed over the holes in the bunker walls, with the exception of the stairwell which has been left open to allow people to climb it. The QR codes in the entrance room take people to this webpage to enable them to find out more about the project; the artists want visitors to experience their own interpretation of the murals, before reading about the context and rationale for them.

Our Project has featured in the Dunoon Observer, you can read the article here:
https://argyllbute24.co.uk/volunteers-transform-historic-balnakailly-bunker-as-community-art-project-takes-shape/

We are a Geocache site! Can you find the Geocache hidden in the Balnakailly Bunker?

The Artists

Maria Bygrove is a Rothesay-based artist and printmaker working mainly in ink, graphite and intaglio techniques. With a background in philosophy and graphic design, her drawing-led practice centres on close observation, careful draftsmanship and the discipline of monochrome across still lifes, portraits and
botanical studies.

Website: mmbygrove.com
Email: [email protected]

Stephen Doak is a Bute Based painter and illustrator working from the Port Gallery in Port Bannatyne. Trained at Central School of Art, he works in acylics and paper collage, creating paintings abstracted from landscapes, cityscapes and everyday subjects, alongside his Colin the Sheep drawings, which celebrate the Isle of Bute through a playful local character.

Instagram: Stephendoak59b
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61565175623046

The Concept

The bunker formed part of a Second World War Starfish decoy site: a place designed to draw enemy bombers away from real communities by creating the illusion of habitation where there was none. The mural follows the same idea of deception, projection and imagination. Its images were chosen because they each deal with the gap between what is there and what is perceived.

In the central room, the generator blueprint points to the hidden mechanism behind the illusion: a machine capable of turning light into the suggestion of a settlement. In the night forest, scattered lights become signs of life when imagined from the viewpoint of a pilot passing overhead. In the phantom rooms, sketched interiors appear through false openings in the bunker walls, suggesting the homes and lives that the decoy lights asked the mind to invent.

Rather than simply illustrating the bunker’s history, the mural asks visitors to experience the logic behind it. A few signals, lines, lights or traces can be enough to suggest a whole world. The bunker once projected a false world outward; this mural brings imagined worlds back inside.

The Design

Maria and Stephen both submitted individual design concepts for the whole bunker.
Maria: (Please insert Phantom Rooms PDF)
Stephen: (Please insert Art of Deception PDF)
Having met with Amie, they combined both of their ideas into one proposal, which was approved by the
Bute Community Land Company Board.

Entrance/ Middle Room:

Amie appealed for generator make and model information through facebook, and the chair of the British Legion advised that he believes the generator was a Coventry Climax ASM. Chat GPT suggests that Coventry Climax Petrol Engine Generators were used at some of the Operation Starfish sites, and the ASM model fits with the time- period. Amie put in a request for information on the generator, bunker and operation starfish on Bute to the MOD, but they were unable to provide any information. We can assume that this generator or something very similar was housed in the building. Maria kindly researched and generated the blueprint image for the mural in the entrance, it is an artistic reconstruction based on historical reference rather than being 100% accurate.