by Shona Cameron
CLIMAVORE CIC has secured £15,000 funding from The National Lottery Community Fund’s Small Eco Awards programme to develop a community-led Tidal Garden in Skye, creating a new space for people to connect with the intertidal environment and each other.
The Tidal Garden, at Black Rock, Scorrybreac, Portree, will be shaped by the rhythms of the tide, the seasons, and the needs of the local community, creating a place where people can come together to care for, learn from and look after Skye’s shoreline.
The project, Tidal Garden: Gather, Connect, Grow, builds on six months of participatory workshops and community engagement delivered by CLIMAVORE between October 2025 and March 2026, as part of an EU-funded programme connected to the UN Ocean Decade. The workshops brought people together to explore the shoreline through food, ecology, emotion, making and local knowledge.
The new 12-month programme will move this work into a longer-term phase, with regular activities and gentle, hands-on interventions shaped around the site and community interests.
Over time, CLIMAVORE hopes the Tidal Garden will become a replicable, welcoming space for gathering, creativity, ecological learning and collective care, demonstrating how small, consistent actions can contribute to a more resilient coastal community.
We wish to thank Clan MacNeacail for allowing us permission to use this space as a temporary exploration of what a Tidal Garden could become.
The learning from the programme will be used to explore how intertidal gardens and shared coastal spaces might develop in other communities, while strengthening CLIMAVORE’s long-term work in Skye and Raasay.