What happens when you open the doors of an old building and simply invite people in?
This weekend, across Clackmannanshire, 26 venues and events took part in Doors Open Days.
At Carsebridge Cultural Campus, we welcomed a steady flow of visitors, including people who had travelled from Edinburgh, Livingston and further afield to spend the day exploring our county.
Heritage brought people through the door. But then something rather wonderful happened. The conversations went everywhere.
We talked about Carsebridge's whisky history, Alloa Bowls, Napoleon's Pillar and Egypt, beer festivals, Community Wealth Building, 3D printing and artificial intelligence.
At one point, we even reached Sisyphus eternally pushing his boulder uphill.
Perhaps that is culture too: people arriving with different interests, knowledge and memories and discovering unexpected connections.
Two visitors particularly brought that home.
John Brown, formerly Head of the Worldwide Overseas Support Group at Carsebridge Distillery, and Charles McGill, formerly Environmental Manager, spent hours with us going through old photographs of the site.
They recognised places and processes, shared stories of the camaraderie amongst colleagues and talked about the innovation that was part of everyday working life here – including finding productive uses for waste materials.
Suddenly, photographs weren't simply photographs anymore. People who had lived and worked within these buildings were adding knowledge back into them.
And inevitably, the conversation moved from the past to the future.
Carsebridge is now in community ownership through Resonate Together, and we are still listening and consulting about what comes next.
Could its remarkable whisky heritage eventually become part of a visitor experience? Could that, in turn, generate income which helps sustain the site and contributes more widely to community wealth in Alloa?
We don't have all those answers yet.
But perhaps opening doors is part of how we find them.
And none of this weekend happens by accident. Susan Mills has coordinated Doors Open Days in Clackmannanshire for many years, now as a volunteer – bringing together venues across the county, coordinating information, promotion and the countless practical details that allow thousands of individual encounters to happen.
That is quite an achievement.
Because Doors Open Days doesn't only give us access to buildings.
It brings people, places, memories and ideas together.
Sometimes we open a door to show people our history.
And discover that they bring another piece of it back to us.
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