On Wednesday 18th March 2026, Raasay Primary School and Nursery pupils and staff along with parents and the community were joined by MOWI to clean our adopted beach below the playpark. We are cleaning the beach as part of Eco Schools and Rights Respecting Schools work that we are doing. This forms part of a wider, island focus on cleaning the Raasay Beaches and removing rubbish, plastics, rope etc. so that our beaches are clean and beautiful.

MOWI provided us with litter pickers, gloves and bags and we started cleaning from one end of the beach to the other. We filled a lot of bags and we found lots of interesting things: rubber duck (probably from one of our school duck races!), food can with Chinese writing, lots of rope, plastic lids, tyres, polystyrene, oil canisters and other small items. Probably our most intriguing find was a ‘message in a bottle’! We all gathered round to see what the message said as one of the MOWI team cut open the bottle. There was a piece of a lego magazine, a head lice leaflet and a handwritten note. On closer inspection we noticed the date on the leaflet was 2001 – 25 years ago! We were very surprised when our School Clerical recognised the telephone number on the handwritten note and realised that the bottle had been sent out to sea back in 2001 by her son. We learnt from finding this bottle that it can take hundreds or even thousands of years for plastic to decompose. The bottle we found was still in perfect condition and dry inside. We also learnt that we have a responsibility to keep our beaches litter free and clean and that we all have a right to play on a clean beach. Every term we will be checking ‘our’ beach to make sure that we are doing our bit in keeping it clean.

This is what we think after our beach clean:

“I think the beach clean was a huge success because we got six or seven bags of rubbish. Having MOWI helped a lot because they brought a boat and took the rubbish away. There were five of them in their team who volunteered their time”

“We wrote to MOWI and received a letter back saying they would help us in the beach clean. I feel happy because the letter we wrote made a difference”

“I would like to thank MOWI for helping us with cleaning the beach and giving up their time. I would also like to thank the community and parents for helping. I hope it is the start of many more beach cleans with MOWI”