Community Archivist’s Blog: Charting the Journey

Hello, and welcome to the first post in what I hope will be a regular series charting the journey of the Community Archive project.

I’m Lydia, and I’ve recently taken on the role of Archivist for the Ecovillage Findhorn Community. I’m a librarian and an archival professional with a background in community heritage and a long-standing fascination with intentional communities and their records. When the opportunity arose to help shape the archive, I knew this was a project unlike any other.

I have worked in many different areas of the GLAM sector (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) over the 25 plus years that I have been in this arena and have enjoyed working with all kinds of materials in many different fields and settings.

Over the coming months and years, I’ll be using this blog to share discoveries, challenges, questions, and hopefully some treasures from the collection. Whether you’re a long-term Community member, a former resident now living elsewhere, a researcher, or simply curious about how archives work, I hope you’ll find something of interest here.

So—where are we starting?

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Phase One: First Impressions

April 2026

Finding the Thread in Findhorn

Arriving in Findhorn on a cold February evening from Inverness, I was deposited into an eco-house in the East Whins, courtesy of a resident who was away, and another resident who kindly picked me up from the airport. I began to explore the Park and its environment, constantly getting lost and spending hours wandering the small roads and paths of the village until I finally found my bearings. I am still overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape—the pine trees, sand dunes, gorse bushes, and the rich flora and fauna.

I’m mesmerized by the beaches, the gulls, and the seals lolling on the sands, finding myself caught up in the rhythm of the waves against an ever-changing shoreline on both sunny and blustery days. I could easily spend a whole day watching the light over the bay and the constant theater of the clouds as they roll away overhead interspersed by the ever-present gulls and crows. It’s a wonderful distraction; I finally understand why some who arrived decades ago simply never left.

There is a distinct energy here—something special, yet impossible to pin down. It’s elusive. I can’t tell if it’s a literal “energy,” or just the light, airy feeling of being among people with such positive ways of being. Or perhaps it’s just the locale itself—these stunningly beautiful surroundings that seem to breathe along with you.

Grounding myself in the energy of the community has been fairly easy. There is so much going on every day, so many groups to get involved with, that you can quickly become overwhelmed with choice. It isn’t hard to get involved; in fact, it’s often more difficult not to.

As the first archivist this community has hired from the outside, I feel a push and pull: I want to step back slightly to maintain a professional, removed stance for the work, yet I feel a deep need to immerse myself in the community to truly do justice to its history.

One month in, and I’m still in that delightful phase of exploration and discovery—though “delightful” sometimes means “overwhelming” when you’re confronted with six decades of material spread across multiple buildings! The brief for this first phase has been to understand what we hold, who holds it, and what condition it’s in. That sounds easy, but is far from it in reality… but you have to start somewhere and so I just dived in feet first into a pool of knowledge and awareness to try and find the bottom before surfacing to find the very edges. I might as well have tried to do this to Loch Ness but I’m definitely a sink or swim type of personality so here goes.

Lately, I’ve been:

Poking around cupboards and shelves at the Park (with permission, I promise!).
Talking to the keepers of the flame—those who were there in the early days and those who have come and gone since.
Tracing the diaspora of records—trying to find where things drifted over the years and who holds what.
Laying the foundations for how we might finally organize it all properly.

My first impressions? The sheer richness of what’s here is staggering, but it is also scattered. Materials are tucked away in libraries, departmental offices, storage rooms, and, I suspect, many private collections belonging to former members. Some of it is in pristine condition; some is fragile and needs urgent attention.

I’m finding “stuff” everywhere, but I’m also finding people everywhere. That is the magic and the challenge of this place. Each person I speak to leads me to someone else, and then to another few to add to my list. The list unravels as I knit it, branching off into a myriad of paths that trail into the undergrowth before I can ravel them back in.

Sometimes I feel like Alice falling down the rabbit hole. As I try to grab hold of the information I’m discovering, it occasionally falls away, leaving me tumbling through the “information gaps.” Hopefully, I will eventually arrive with a bump into an organised archive. I suspect, however, I’ll find a mound of boxes and papers waiting to be catalogued—but at least they’ll make for a soft landing.

Wish me luck as I start to doggy paddle along the edges of this huge Loch of Languished Lore, sunken, silent and still resilient, where forgotten threads find voice and spread.