Slate island
Easdale
A car-free island reached by a five-minute passenger ferry, where paths link flooded quarries, slate history and the island's only pub and eatery.
- Crossing
- About five minutes
- Getting around
- On foot; the whole island takes under an hour
- Landscape
- Seven flooded former quarries
Photo: Rob Farrow · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A tiny island shaped by slate
Easdale turns an industrial landscape into a compact visit of quarry paths, local history, community life and food by the sound.
Come for the unusual combination of a vehicle-free island and the visible remains of slate quarrying. The folk museum explains that history, paths thread around the flooded workings, and the Puffer provides the island's sole food and drink stop.
Where to go
Places in Easdale
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 places
Start here
The Puffer Bar & Restaurant
The island's only pub and eatery occupies two former slate-quarriers' cottages, with a modern cafe, a cosy bar and seasonal seafood cooking.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Easdale Island
- Access
- The island's only pub and eatery is reached by passenger ferry.
Easdale Island Folk Museum
Displays cover the slate industry, army volunteers, education, public health, geology, boats and entertainment, and include an 1881 island map.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Easdale Island
- Access
- The museum is on car-free Easdale Island, reached by passenger ferry from Ellenabeich.
Easdale Island Walk
A compact island circuit follows footpaths between old slate cottages, around flooded quarries and by the decaying slate-loading pier.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Under an hour for the whole island
- Locality
- Easdale Island
- Access
- There are no vehicles; footpaths thread between old slate cottages and around the flooded quarries.
Food & drink
1 placeOyster Bar & Restaurant
A neighbouring-Seil restaurant serving locally sourced seafood with views across the Atlantic toward Scarba and Jura.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Ellenabeich on neighbouring Seil
- Access
- Reach Ellenabeich by the passenger ferry from Easdale Island.
Walks & outdoors
1 placeFlooded Slate Quarries
Seven flooded former quarries form still, dark pools among heather and ruins in the island's blueish-black slate landscape.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Easdale Island
- Access
- The flooded quarries are used for wild and cold-water swimming.
Things to do
2 placesEasdale Island Community Hall
A community events venue with a distinctive pyramid roof, hosting concerts, ceilidhs and community gatherings.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 60 minutes for an event
- Locality
- Easdale Island
- Access
- Visit for a scheduled concert, ceilidh or community gathering.
World Stone Skimming Championships
An annual all-comers championship where naturally formed Easdale slate stones are checked through the gauge known as the ring of truth.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 180 minutes
- Locality
- A flooded slate quarry on Easdale Island
- Access
- Held each September and open to all-comers.
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Three ways to explore Easdale
Signature outings
Flooded Slate Quarries
Follow the island paths around seven dark, water-filled former quarries set among slate ruins and heather.
The Puffer
Settle into the island's only pub and eatery for local seafood, home baking or the Saturday Sea Shack service.
Easdale Island Community Hall
Look for the hall's pyramid roof, then check its programme of concerts, ceilidhs and community gatherings.
The village story
Easdale Village Guide
Wheelbarrows, a passenger ferry and flooded slate quarries define this tiny car-free island.
Wheelbarrows and the Passenger Ferry
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 and Ellenabeich
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.
Slate, Storms and Flooded Quarries
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.
Stone Skimming and the Community Hall
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.
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
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- File:Easdale - The Puffer bar and restaurant - geograph.org.uk - 7263507.jpg — photograph by Rob Farrow; Easdale - The Puffer bar and restaurant by Rob Farrow. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- The Puffer Bar & Restaurant — thepuffereasdale.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Easdale Island Folk Museum — easdalemuseum.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Easdale Island Walk — easdale.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Flooded Slate Quarries — easdalemuseum.org other published source
- Easdale Island Community Hall — easdaleislandhall.org operator, sector body or destination organisation
- World Stone Skimming Championships — stoneskimming.com operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Oyster Bar & Restaurant — oysterbareasdale.com operator, sector body or destination organisation