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Along with a group of pupils from Castlebay High, we planted a post and installed a time lapse camera in Borve. The camera will allow us to monitor the action of the waves on the coast and assess how they move and how much they are contributing to erosion and undermining the grave yard. The camera is set to take one picture every hour so we are looking forward to seeing the action of the waves. we had to protect the camera from the cattle that graze in this area as they will

Paul visited Eoligarry beach on a very windy day to get a sense of the level of dune erosion. Some of the people who live in Eoligarry shared pictures after a recent storm. The power of the waves eats into the dunes and cuts off slices. Those who braved that windy day gleaned some assurance that change is a natural process for dunes.

A group of young people who live in Barra and Vatersay successfully raised funds to make a film about coastal erosion in the islands. They interviewed various members of the team about their understanding of the problem and what Muir is Tir hopes to achieve. We explored the different sites of the project with them. The sun was shining so it was perfect filming. We decided to have the section in St Brendan's Graveyard in Borve in Gaelic. This is an old site that is steeped in

Our task this weekend was to illustrate saltmarsh that we can use to show this on the map. Lily Scott got the session started with an overview of the mapping process and detail on exactly where the saltmarsh is. She discussed what she had learned whilst working with Prof. Bill Austin, Dr Alex Houston and the interns from St Andrews University. While Barra and Vatersay does not have a lot of saltmarsh what it has is important as a habitat, a carbon store and a coastal buffer.

Dr Paul Rooney is an internationally esteemed environmental scientist whose central focus is sand dunes. He calls himself a sand dune nerd. He visited to offer the team and the community his views on the sand dunes of Barra and Vatersay and how we can best care for them. He spend time on site with groups of pupils from Castlebay and Eoligarry Primary Schools. They share their thoughts for the blog and you can read these below. Amy It was a boring Monday morning in school but

We painted the sea with the help of the young people from the craft club. We used a range of dyes of different tones of green, blue, umber and white. We thought about the texture of the sea and the waves and tried to create this using different brush strokes and splashing techniques. we also used salt and this was particularly effective. It was great fun painting on this scale. The more that we painted we had to be careful not to stand on the paint. The map now has a sea that

In the August of 2025, Muir Is Tir kicked off the project’s coastal monitoring work with a month of fieldwork on the dunes of Vatersay and Eoligarry. This being the project’s first summer in operation, the goal of this year’s field season was to gather initial baseline data on the plants and soils from each of our sites. Over the course of a month, Muir Is Tir’s researcher Amanda Vestergaard surveyed a total of 30 plots alongside local volunteers and community groups. After d

Over the past few weeks I have been writing an introductory summary for a new website muiristir.co.uk Muir is Tìr  is a project that is looking at coastal erosion in Barra and Vatersay in the Western Isles of Scotland.  Three sites are being surveyed, and it is hoped that some Nature Based Solutions will be identified to combat the effects of erosion brought about by climate change. In describing the site at Vatersay I came across a dilemma.  That is how to describe the sea t

This weekend we got the basics of the textile map in place. With a helpful group of volunteers we set out the outline of the map of Barra and Vatersay in textiles. We used a large piece of sheet fabric to give us space to include all of the stories and science that we will create over the next four years. Using a giant print out based on a smaller map we cut out the shapes of the island and bondawebbed these to the base layer. It was very tricky to make sure that these were a