Ellenabeich

A Quarry-Side Table

The Oyster Bar sits a short walk from the free car park, and its rear decking looks out over a flooded quarry pit that used to be a working slate hole. The kitchen leans on locally landed seafood, though the menu keeps a foot in pub territory too — chargrilled beef burger, chilli beef nachos, surf and turf. The Chaotic Scot found "big portions of decent, home-cooked pub food" and rated the view across the Atlantic to Scarba and Jura. It opens seven days a week, which in a village this size makes it the eating and drinking spot rather than one of several.

The village is a tight run of white-harled terraced cottages, once quarry-workers' homes, set beneath a steep rocky hillside on the Atlantic edge of Seil. The flooded quarry sits right beside the houses. Beyond it the water opens to Easdale, Scarba, the Garvellachs, Mull and Jura. Look closely at the local slate and you'll see it glint — it carries pyrites, fool's gold.

The Island the Quarry Took

The quarry is the whole story here. The Campbells of Breadalbane started digging in 1745, and by 1842 steam pumps let them work 250 feet below sea level, the pit held back from the sea by a single narrow rock wall. At the 1870s peak, Ellenabeich and neighbouring Easdale filled ten steamers a week from a purpose-built pier. These were, in the standing phrase, "the islands that roofed the world."

Then in 1881 a storm breached the wall and the sea came in. Several hundred jobs went with the flood, and the slate was near exhausted anyway. The pit has stayed much as it was left. The village is named after an island that no longer exists — Eilean nam Beitheach, the island of the birchwoods, was quarried away entirely, its spoil filling the channel until the site simply joined onto Seil.

Across the Sound

From the shore a foot ferry runs to Easdale Island, a five-minute crossing roughly every half hour, turn-up-and-go. Easdale is car-free; residents move things around in brightly painted wheelbarrows, and its own flooded quarry hosts the World Stone Skimming Championships, started in 1983 by a former resident, reputedly after an argument in the island's only pub over who could skim farthest. The stones are cut from Easdale slate.

Back in Ellenabeich, An Cala is a walled garden begun in 1930 by Arthur Murray and his wife Faith Celli, the actress J. M. Barrie chose for many of his plays. It started with six sycamores and a willow; Thomas Mawson helped lay it out, and there are streams, a waterfall, ponds, azaleas and cherry trees now. The Heritage Centre, in a former quarry-worker's cottage, covers 19th-century slate life and the local geology.

A Film Set and the Road In

Parts of Ring of Bright Water were filmed here in 1969, the village standing in for Gavin Maxwell's Camusfearna. Mij the otter was played by two otters trained in Wisconsin.

You reach Seil across the Clachan Bridge, Telford's single-arch "Bridge Over the Atlantic," off the A816 from Oban. The 418 bus runs from Oban roughly every three hours. Oban, twelve miles off, is the nearest railway.

Ellenabeich, Not Easdale

The village is labelled "Easdale" on some maps, after the slate. Locals would rather you called it Ellenabeich.