Ellenabeich
Ellenabeich is often subsumed with Easdale. It is in fact a separate village in its own right, where the ferry departs for the Island of Easdale. It is the largest village on the Isle of Seil, which is itself an island but never really seen as one, as it’s actually connected to the mainland by the famous Clachan Bridge, better known as the ‘Bridge over the Atlantic’. The bridge was designed by a John Stevenson from Oban and built by Robert Mylne in 1792. It has a span of only 22 metres but for such a small bridge has a big place in the history of Scotland, and indeed in my own formative years, as I’ve travelled over it many times with my parents, as a young boy, and as a father with my own family. It remains a gateway to something beyond and magical.
Over to Easdale
One of the smallest ferry routes in Scotland is the one to Easdale from Ellenabeich. It takes five minutes, costs a few pounds and takes you to an island like no other. But there was time before the ferry to explore a little of Ellenabeich. It is simply all slate related here, deep pools, which bare testament to the depth of the original quarries, white-washed cottages now holiday homes, they once housed the slate workers in hard and very basic conditions.
The beaches are piled high with the discarded slate to help stem the advance of the Atlantic and protect the quarries.
Easdale would have once had a population of over 500, this would have been in the mid nineteenth century at the height of the slate industry. Slate was exported to Glasgow and all over the world. In 1960 the population had dwindled to only four, but now stands at around sixty, mostly related to tourism.
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