Archives: Findhorn's Eco-Village Conference and Callanish, Scotland

1995 - The whole Sherwood Cameron family and a friend Leslie adventured in Scotland. Everyone participated in community at Findhorn where experienced eco-village founders and enthusiasts gathered from all over the globe. David and Nancy had already foreseen an eco-village in their future and wanted to learn from those who had joined an experiment in sustainable living.

Callanish standing stonesWhen they left that dynamic event they were joined by a friend who was working with Nancy, and all of them travelled to the Isle of Lewis in the Hebrides. They found out that everything was locked Sunday, including swings on playgrounds, but that they could visit the stones of Callanish. Setting out from their hostel which was in a traditional “black cottage” they arrived in the mist on the vacant grounds of the ancient stones.

CallanishThis left Nancy and Diane time to “dance the stones,” a form of shamanic journeying and thereby to intuit what had happened on the site over eons of time. The mystery and drama of Lewis’s landscape, the ways of the crofters as told by an aging weaver, the laughter of three younger women, and a child, wove them together in a fabric of historic and contemporary story-making for them to recall years later.

The young women went off to other destinations while David and Nancy journeyed back south through Scotland to Oban. They wanted their son, Oban, who was five at the time, to connect to his name place. Oban loved the castle ruins there and the several more that we visited in Edinburgh, Stirling and in Dumfries. Please, just one more!

Nancy, David and Oban went to Iona and the electricity was off all day so they hiked to the blow hole and the beaches and experienced something closer to that of Columba and his monks than a modern day person. Oban found a green bottle bottom with the image of a boar on it; we were not very far from the spirits of the Druids who used Iona as a sacred site before the Christian era.

The family trio went on to Dumfries where they were hosted by a friend who really knew his way around ring forts, fairy hills and castles and who offered a Scottish welcome.

When the whole family got back together, they shared their experiences of both Scotland the old and the new and everyone wanted to start over and do it again.