IT’S NINE o’clock on a cold, dark night and a small open boat is transporting six people across the storm-blustered Atlantic waters from Seil, in Argyllshire, to the tiny island of Easdale. The passengers are committed partygoers – you’d have to be to set off in the face of horizontal rain. We thought we had signed up for a night of dancing, instead we’re at sea and can’t see land.
So begins a typical Saturday night on Easdale, the smallest inhabited island in the inner Hebrides and the location for the World Stone Skimming Championships. This competition weekend begins with an ice-breaking dance in the village hall. The noise greets us from the pier, so we follow our ears to where the band is warming up.
Ranged round the stage in a motionless semicircle, the village children – mostly boys – stand with their jeans tucked into wellies, oblivious to the grown-ups dancing round them like banshees. A young baby is jiggled and a man in waterproof dungarees dances with an elderly lady.
Apart from Christmas, I am told, this is the biggest event of the year and the residents of this small island know how to enjoy themselves.
Adrian Laycock watches the competition with satisfaction, welcoming the visitors to the village.
“I think the stone skimming is very important,” he says. “We didn’t come here to retire and die, we came to live. Events like this help to keep the place alive.”
The older Laycock is quick to point out that they’re a vibrant forward-looking community, yet the wonder of Easdale lies in its old fashionedness. At under 25 acres it is tiny, with all the houses ranged round the village green. There are no front gardens, and most islanders concede that you don’t move here to get away from people.
People work from home or travel to Oban on the mainland, and although there are a number of artists and musicians on the island there are also pharmacists and shop assistants. The difference is that whilst most people worry about catching the bus in the morning, here you take the ferry.
“Once the ferry’s off at the end of a night, then the people who are left are the ones who really want to be here,” says Melville, a civil servant. “I quite enjoy that.”
That the island works is proven time and again during the weekend. There is a wonderful sense of integration. The crowds for the skimming event feel it, basking in the beautiful sunshine, enjoying what Melville calls “the serious fun”.
By close of play Scotland had swept the boards. Every title would stay here. The little 12-seat boat plies backwards and forwards taking the day-trippers home to the cities and their anonymity. Once the ferry has finished, the locals – the ones who really want to be here – are left to themselves again.
Any grown man who doesn’t care about skipping stones — has forgotten how to be a boy.
