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HISTORY
An Introduction to the Island of Seil
Sell is reached by crossing ‘the Bridge over the Atlantic’.
This was built in 1792 by the brothers
John and Hugh Stevenson who also founded the distillery in Oban. It is virtually unchanged and copes now with traffic that would not even have been imagined then. In May it is covered by a tiny purple flower known locally as Fairy Foxglove.
The islands of Seil, Luing and Easdale were fa-mous for the production of slate for roofing houses. From before the 1600’s slate was being produced and many famous buildings including Glasgow Cathedral and lona Abbey were roofed with Easdale slate. In the mid 1800’s between 7 and 19 million slates were exported annually to places such as New Zealand, Australia, the West Indies, and the Eastern Seaboard of the USA. This explains why these islands are sometimes referred to as ‘the islands that roofed the world’. The small white-walled miners’ cottages in Balvi-car, Ellenabeich, Easdale Island and Luing are re-minders of an industrial past. In 1881, as a result of a very bad storm, the quarries on Easdale Is-land were flooded and work never resumed on the same level as before.
