Day 40-Monday 27th June.- Findhorn.

Today was all about the Findhorn Foundation and trying to come to a view about the place. Firstly though, I looked around the village. It has a strong architectural style of single storey former fisherman's cottages. They are tightly packed like the sardines they probably caught,They used to have no garden boundaries and it was unclear which were fronts and which were backs.This must have made for, and been reflective of, a close community and something of this is retained, despite the fishermen having long since gone.

Where the houses have been extended it seems to have happened in  sensitive and interesting ways.

The influence of the Foundation extends into the village, as it runs the local well regarded bakery and adjoining cafe.This served great coffee.

The foundation was established by Peter and Eileen Caddy, plus his secretary Dorothy Maclean in the late 50s. It started with Peter and Eileen moving onto the caravan site at Findhorn. He was an ex RAF pilot who had gone into catering, but was now out of work.Eileen was formerly married to a more high ranking officer and left 5 kids to be with Peter. They settled on the caravan site and started to put down roots in more ways than one.She spent a lot of time meditating in the toilet block in order to find some peace away from her 3 new kids. She was soon telling Peter that it would be a good place to grow vegetables and they were soon growing 2ft cabbages.She put their success down to earth energy and soon the neighbours were talking and people started visiting.At some stage Dorothy built an extension onto the caravan to live in.The original caravan and its extension are in their original location.

The vision statement of Findhorn says that it is a "spiritual community, Eco-village and international centre for holistic education helping to unfold a new human consciousness and create a positive and sustainable future". There are about 250 people who live on the site in a range of types of accommodation. There are mobile homes and chalets but the grandest ones are houses within the Field of Dreams, where people have built their own properties.

I felt that the character within the park had a very strong resemblance to the main village. The closeness of the houses, the small plots and the sense of community seemed much the same. I don't know whether this was the original intention or a happy accident, but it works in a campus sort of way.

The founders needed to build meeting places for visitors and for people who were now living on the site to join them.A community hall followed by a universal hall followed. These have been built with volunteer labour and much skill and creativity. I particularly liked the stone work, which has been built without mortar.

There is also now an arts centre and it was featuring a photography exhibition by Edwin Smith who left a legacy of over 60,000 photos of buildings, which are now held by the Royal Institute of British Architects.I particularly liked one of a farmstead in Deptford, Wiltshire taken in the mid fifties.

Another impressive building was the nature centre.It had a calm space inside.

I joined the guided walk, which took about 2 hours. The guide was happy to field any and every question as best he could. It was clear though with such a disparate range of movements and interests encompassed by the place it was difficult to know about everything. It was clear there was a heavy reliance on volunteer labour from the people who stayed for taster weeks.Much work was paid for with just a meal ticket. It was also the case that the resident population was weighted to the over 40s and that it had not served the Foundation well to sell off the housing plots freehold. This had led to an expensive range of properties and some of these were disproportionately large. Planning permission for a further 300 dwellings within the dune land had been given but it was not clear what sort of model would be used to ensure these would  remain affordable and helped re balance the stock.

Overall, it was hard not to like the place. I may have dwelt on the physical aspects of the built form, but these demonstrated the abundance of innovation, creativity, energy and vision around the place.Whilst its origins were about the particular earth energy of this corner of The Moray Firth it has become a spiritual centre and focus for the wider alternative view of how our lives should be run. It says it is a place for experimentation and like all experiments some can be more successful than others.It seems to me that it is good that such a place exists to ensure like minded people can came together. I could be critical about aspects of it and its shortcomings but this seems petty, when it is a force for such good thinking about how we should relate to nature and each other.I am glad I stayed a while to engage with it. I know I have only skimmed the surface, but I can not spare the time to do more than this. the place was set up by people who arrived with no visionary zeal. They just did what seemed right at the time. This chimed with others and continues to do so.

The site adjoins RAF Kinloss, where the peace and tranquility is blasted away when the Tornados take off, The Nimrods have now been removed and the site is closing down. Overall this is seen as a good thing within the foundation .However, there has been a strong  and unlikely symbiotic relationship between the two sites. The attraction between Eileen and Peter seems to have been echoed down the years. There have been many relationships formed beween Pilots and women visiting the Foundation. Crawford spoke about the stereotypical german women who found Englishmen a refreshing cange from the more domineering german males. All this will change when the pilots move to Culdrose or wherever.