For our very first episode of The Nairnshire Community Newspaper Podcast: Stories from Land to Sea, we sat down with conservationist Mark Bradfield, who moved from Oxfordshire to the Highlands purely out of love for wildlife… and somehow found himself knee-deep in marram grass on Nairn’s Central Beach.

In this episode, Mark takes us on a fascinating tour of the Dune Resilience Project, a pilot scheme designed to protect one of Nairn’s most cherished places - the dunes many of us stroll through daily, often without realising how essential they are in keeping the sea out of Fishertown.

We cover everything:

• Why Nairn’s dunes are more fragile than they look
• How rising sea levels, stronger storms, and even our own footprints affect the coastline
• The surprising role of marram grass (it’s basically the unsung hero of the Highlands)
• How butterflies, bees, and even moths depend on healthy dune ecosystems
• Why fencing matters, and why Mark really hopes we don’t step over it
• What the community can do right now to help protect the dunes
• How citizen science - and a couple of good apps - can turn all of us into naturalists
• And what’s next for the project as monitoring and data collection begin

Mark’s passion is contagious, his explanations wonderfully grounded, and he left us seeing the dunes with completely fresh eyes.

Honestly - you might never look at marram grass the same way again.

Chapters:

• 00:00 Intro: Meet conservationist Mark Bradfield
• 02:00 Moving to the Highlands & first impressions of Nairn
• 05:00 What conservation really is
• 09:00 Water voles, mink, and how ecosystems fall out of balance
• 14:00 What the Dune Resilience Project is trying to achieve
• 17:00 Why dunes matter more than you think
• 20:00 Climate change, storms, and the future of Nairn’s coastline
• 25:00 Marram grass: the quiet superhero of coastal defence
• 29:00 Wildlife on the dunes: butterflies, moths, bees and more
• 33:00 What’s threatening the dunes - and how we can help
• 37:00 Clearing scrub, planting grasses, and volunteer power
• 42:00 Citizen science and the apps that make it easy
• 46:00 What’s next for the project & how to get involved
• 50:00 Closing thoughts: patience, hope, and nature’s pace