The Good Life Growing Vegetables, Chopping Wood and Morning Meditation . . . Vicky Allan Visits Two Scottish Communes and Finds Out What Life Is Like When Self-Sufficiency and Caring for Others Is Judged More Important Than Living in a Material World

Summary

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YOU might imagine life in a commune to be more alien than this. That there must be dancing to the moon goddess, acid visions and free love. But when I visit Monimail Tower Community, near Cupar in Fife on January 14 there is just work, food, chat, work, food, chat, wood chopping (work), pumpkin eating, tea drinking and talk of the occasional cocktail party. As Marion Rose, Monimail's longest- standing member, says, "It's much less unconventional than people think it's going to be." The weirdest thing they do here, she says, is fell trees and make their own planks.

There are many popular misconceptions about living in a commune, mainly based on that Sixties golden age, when it seemed half the world was growing their hair, tuning in and dropping out. But the idea of the Utopian community has not disappeared, nor was it new then. Scotland has long had its attempts to create ideal societies, from Robert Owen's early 19th-Century socialist model villages at New Lanark and Orbiston, to the Camphill centres, the first of which was set up by Austrian refugees in a manse outside Aberdeen in 1939 to care for children with special needs.

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The Good Life Growing Vegetables, Chopping Wood and Morning Meditation . . . Vicky Allan Visits Two Scottish Communes and Finds Out What Life Is Like When Self-Sufficiency and Caring for Others Is Judged More Important Than Living in a Material World

More recently, there was Findhorn, established in 1962 by guru- like matriarch Eileen Caddy.

Famed initially for its 40lb cabbages and communications with nature's spirits, it is now an advanced eco-village with a programme of events and courses, a place of pilgrimage for those interested in alternative living.

There are around 100,000 Britons living in "intentional communities", the inclusive term for eco-villages, communes, housing cooperatives - anywhere, in fact, where yoghurt might be knitted.

The Diggers and Dreamers website, a guide to communal living, lists 15 intentional communities in Scotland. They range from Balnakeil Craft Village in Sutherland to the Faslane peace camp, to Laurieston Hall in Dumfries and Galloway, which claims no strict philosophy, just that the...

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