A couple who moved out of London to run Scotland’s most remote pub say visitors travel thousands of miles for a drink.
Rachel Devine, 46 and wife Jhennia Leipert, 44, manage The Puffer Bar on Easdale. One of the Slate Islands, it is the smallest permanently inhabited island of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides.
Home to approximately 60 people, Easdale has no roads. As reported by the Daily Record, The Puffer Bar was recently named the most remote pub in the whole of the UK.
Devine and Leipert chose to leave the hustle and bustle behind and move to Easdale following the Covid-19 lockdown. The previous owners of The Puffer Bar had run it for 10 years.
Devine commented: “We have to take everything over on a small boat and then we have to use wheel barrels to go around the island. It is a really kind and friendly community.
“It is quite empty in the winter because of the boats — a lot of people don’t want to come over when the weather it is a bit rougher. We are kind of left to ourselves so it is a nice time to chill and for the locals and to use the pub — of course, during the summer it gets crazy busy with tourists.
“Everybody does know each other quite well. The pub is a real meeting place and everybody feels a bit of ownership of the pub who does come in.”
The Puffer Bar is a pub and restaurant where visitors can enjoy a variety of fresh food and drink. The restaurant is currently closed for the season, but the pub is still open from 6pm between Thursday and Saturday.
In 2023, the venue received a major renovation overseen by Banjo Beale for the BBC series Designing The Hebrides. According to Devine, her and Leipert were “very worried” about how locals were going to react to the new design.
She continued: “[The pub] had originally been styled like an old puffer boat — they were like black and red, they were dark and looked like a designed of a boat. Banjo came in and we lightened it up — he kept the boat motif with the bar.
“It looks very different than it did a year ago but the islanders were great. Some of them were a wee bit sad that we were doing it but I think most people have really taken to.
“It brings a new life into the pub and it reset it for us as new owners.”
Tourists from around the world journey to The Puffer Bar each year to enjoy some food or drink at the UK’s most remote pub. Devine states that it used to feature a collection of foreign money, where tourists would pin a note of their home currency to the ceiling.
Devine added: “There is money from Thailand, America, Brazil, Nigeria, Australia. I think for a lot of people is a really fun thing to do to visit us and being on a carless island that makes it feel remote because we are so used to vehicles all the time. “
Each September, The Puffer Bar gets swarmed with customers as a result of the World Stone Skimming Championships. Participants are challenged to skim a stone as far as they can across a flooded quarry.
Devine said: “We are the only cafe and restaurant in the island and suddenly visitors go from 100 to 200 a day to 1,500 to 2,000 on a very busy stone skimming. The pub gets packed and there’s people in every corner queuing for beer.”
On New Year’s Eve, the final boat stops at 7pm. After this, there is no way to get off the island for two days.
She added: “The pub just started come into life for Hogmanay and then everybody on New Year’s Day goes to play this massive game of football on the green side next to the pub. Then they all go for a cold water dip into the sea and then the next stop is the pub for whisky just to get warm and to dry off after the dip.”
Despite not regretting their decision to take over the business, Devine admits it can be “challenging” at times. She shared: “Sometimes we definitely say to each other ‘what on earth were we thinking’ but on the whole we have loved most every moment of it.
“It is really hard — it is much more work then we realised and we thought it was going to be a lot of work. But it is remote in the sense of just even trying to get food and drink to do the pub and takes a lot of effort.
“During Stone Skimming we had to drive 200 miles just to pick up some scallops and drive back again.”
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