An Unemployed Hotelier's Caravan Garden

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Peter Caddy's path into founding a spiritual community began with an ordinary career reversal. He had managed the Cluny Hill Hotel near Forres, Scotland through the late 1950s, following an earlier career as a Royal Air Force officer, and lost that position in 1961. The following year, with his wife Eileen and their children, he moved into a caravan on a nearby park at Findhorn and, out of practical necessity as much as anything else, began growing vegetables on the poor sandy soil around it. The garden should not have performed well on that ground, and Caddy attributed its unusual productivity to guidance Eileen received through meditation, a claim that drew press coverage once the results became visible to neighbors and, eventually, national media. What began as one unemployed family's attempt to feed itself became, within a few years, a fixed point that other seekers started traveling to visit, and the caravan site is the literal ground the Findhorn Foundation still occupies. Caddy was born on 20 March 1917, and before his hotel career he trained as a manager with J. Lyons and Company, an early education in running a large institution that later showed in how quickly the caravan garden grew into an organized settlement rather than staying an improvised vegetable patch.