Field Notes: Thoughts on a Camasunary beach clean

Skye mountain guide and photographer Adrian Trendall reflects on a recent beach clean on Skye's Strathaird penisula.

Any beach clean is good, but the one at Camasunary sounded a bit extra since it involved not only the John Muir Trust, but also students from Loughborough University as well as local volunteers from the island.

We were late arrivals and as we descended the steep landrover track we had a bird’s eye views of a hive of activity - a mini D-Day - as volunteers scurried around with plastic bags of rubbish.

Piles of maritime debris and huge dumpy bags filled with plastic awaited collection. MOWI was due to arrive later with a boat to take away all the collected rubbish including some big chunks of tubes and piping that had broken free from fish farms.

In many ways it was a day of highs and lows. Great to see about 30 people helping clean things up. Great to see students plotting the density of plastic debris on the beach. Great to see the involvement of the John Muir Trust and MOWI. But, and it’s a huge but, this is one bay on the edge of a huge ocean and it is absolutely inundated with maritime debris. Fishing nets and buoys, ropes and plastic ties, plastic bottles, plastic bags are all being washed up and ground into the sand and the soil. Vegetation is growing over the plastic, doing its best to hide man’s despoliation of a beautiful landscape.

Clean ups have an effect, but it does feel like a losing battle as the plastic is continually washed up, broken down by waves and weather and micro plastic get into the water supply, the food chain and will eventually affect everyone on the planet. Plastic bags, plastic trays and assorted debris are being blown inland and are breaking down and polluting the whole landscape.

I certainly don’t know what the answer is, but things need to change and PDQ. Fishing and other maritime practices need to change and all this plastic needs to be stopped at source rather than relying on volunteers trying to pick up a minimal percentage of it as it washes ashore.

The amount of fishing gear lost, abandoned or discarded is a damning indictment on the industry. The beach is littered with nets, buoys, plastic trays all being smashed to bits by storms and waves, all degenerating into micro plastics that will contaminate everything, the beach, the soil inland, the sea water and the water table inland. Ditto, stuff washed overboard or dumped at sea by all manner of ships.

Many thanks to everyone who turned up, to the John Muir Trust and its local representative, John MacRae (pictured above), to Loughborough Uni and its staff and students, to farm-raised salmon producers MOWI and to all the local volunteers from Skye Beach Cleans who willingly gave up their time.

• Find out more about Dr Tom Stanton and his 50 years of litter on Skye project team from Loughborough University, who were returning for a third season of monitoring and helping clear beach debris on Skye.

Photographs and words courtesy of Skye-based mountain guide and photographer Adrian Trendall from All Things Cuillin.