Goods on Easdale still move by wheelbarrow. There are no cars, no roads, no street lights, and the island is small enough that you can walk the whole of it in under an hour, so the wheelbarrow is not really an inconvenience. It is simply how things get from the ferry to the front door.
You reach the island by a small open passenger ferry that crosses about 200 metres of water from Ellenabeich, on neighbouring Seil, in roughly five minutes. It takes around ten people, foot passengers and bicycles only, and runs year-round about every half hour with breaks near 1pm and 6pm. Whatever you bring, you carry.
The Puffer Bar & Restaurant is the island's only pub, cafe and eatery, which makes it the obvious place to end up. It occupies two former slate-quarriers' cottages — a modern cafe on one side, a bar on the other, the bar redesigned by Banjo Beale for the BBC series Designing the Hebrides. The kitchen leans on what comes out of the water: langoustines, crabs, local meats, haddock-bite sandwiches, soups, and huge homemade scones with island-grown bramble jam and cream. On Saturday nights the "Puffer Seashack" does fish and chips, seafood and burgers. Dogs are welcome, and the outdoor seating looks across the sound. One Tripadvisor review is titled simply "Best island pub ever."
There are no shops. With a population of around sixty, the Puffer is the whole of the island's retail. For anything else you take the ferry back to Seil, where the Oyster Bar & Restaurant at Ellenabeich serves seafood with views out toward Scarba and Jura.
What you walk between is the wreckage of an industry. Slate was quarried here from the 18th century, and at its peak more than 500 people worked as many as seven quarries, some cut 300 feet below sea level. Easdale slate roofed buildings in Melbourne, Dublin, Nova Scotia and Dunedin. Then a storm in 1850 flooded most of the pits, and another in 1881 breached the sea walls and filled them overnight. With no way to pump the water out, that was more or less that. The last slate was cut in the 1950s, and the population fell to five people by the early 1960s.
The seven flooded quarries are still here, sitting like dark pools among the heather and the ruined cottages. People swim in them now, cold-water and wild. The slate itself is about 445 million years old, blueish-black, tilted at roughly 45 degrees, flecked with iron pyrites that catch the light.
Once a year one of the quarries hosts the World Stone Skimming Championships, held every September. Stones must be naturally formed Easdale slate, no wider than three inches, checked through a gauge nicknamed the "ring of truth." In 2025 several competitors were disqualified for sanding their stones to fit. As the toss master Kyle Matthews put it, "The stones were specifically shaped to fit the measurer, which is not allowed."
The community hall has a pyramid roof you can see from the water before you land. Florence and the Machine filmed two music videos on the island and used the residents as cast.
