As a Teaching Venue
Fordyce Academy will offer programmes in personal development, group development, organisation development and leadership development; and, for travellers with a tale, workshops in life-writing and storytelling.
In the Spring of 2026, the new owners of Fordyce Academy will open its doors for the first time in more than half a century. Their intention is to re-establish this beautiful building as a place of learning again for those who are thinking about what they should make of themselves, and how they should make something, too, of their own lives.
‘…education is a way of becoming ourselves, of flourishing as intelligent and sentient beings, of being alive to the world. Becoming ourselves in this way requires…the courage to be: the everyday, commonplace courage required to gather one’s inner resources, gain a sense of integrity and purpose, and achieve agency in an increasingly interconnected yet fractured world.’
Education theorist, Jon Nixon
The former classrooms will become spaces for discussion and creative collaboration - where participants will be able to engage in reflection and dialogue that transcends subject divides, disciplinary boundaries and methodological frameworks; that gives credence to different modes of reasoning; and that honours the ongoing history of understanding that we are all born into, enabling us to re-interpret the world and, in so doing, change it.
About the Academy‘To seek to understand is to acknowledge that – for all our differences – we inhabit a shared world. And to acknowledge that we inhabit such a world is to recognise ourselves as ethical beings who bear moral responsibility for one another.’
Jon Nixon
Fordyce Academy will offer programmes in personal development, group development, organisation development and leadership development; and, for travellers with a tale, workshops in life-writing and storytelling.
The venue will be available for-hire for the exclusive use of groups to talk and think together in its beautifully refurbished inside-and-outside spaces.
The Academy will provide exhibition and performance space in its large, light-filled front halls.
“No-one has a life worthy of consideration about which a story cannot be told.”
Hannah Arendt
Life-Writing is an expansive genre that defies definition – a mysterious, even magical coming together of autobiography with the concept of the Self as it arises in writing. We are storytelling organisms who, in our continual interpretation and reinterpretation of life-events, make ourselves in the stories we tell of who we are; reflecting in-writing, supports this important work of self-making.
From June 30th- July 4th, 2025, we will be offering a Life-Writing Retreat at La Garriga de Castelladral, a farmhouse of medieval origins restored now as a charming eco-hotel in the Catalan Mountains, Spain.
More Information
The village of Fordyce in North-East Scotland dates back to the founding of a church by the Pictish saint, St Tarlarican, the remains of which are scattered in the Old Kirkyard. It grew up as the focus of a large, agricultural parish. Today it is a quiet, picturesque place of narrow streets and lanes; delightful houses, cottages, gardens and small parks; a castle built in the Scottish baronial style at the crossways of the village; the medieval kirkyard; a bistro specialising in locally caught seafood set in the former parish church; and a joiners’ workshop and museum offering a glimpse into the life of the village carpenter.
LocationFordyce Academy will be available as a venue to hire. More details will be available soon.