Mohegan Bluffs

The island's original inhabitants were the Manisseans, a people connected to the Niantic and Narragansett of the nearby mainland. They called the island Manisses, often translated as island of the little god, and lived here by fishing, farming, and gathering for thousands of years before Europeans came.

By tradition, the bluffs are named for a confrontation in the late 1500s in which a party of Mohegans from the mainland came to raid the island and were met and defeated by the Manisseans at these cliffs. The story is remembered in the place name that endures today. The Native peoples of this region are living communities, not a closed chapter, and the Narragansett Tribe continues in Rhode Island in the present.

Block Island itself is a product of the last ice age. It is a terminal moraine, a ridge of clay, sand, gravel, and boulders bulldozed to the surface and left behind by the glacier that once covered New England, then stranded offshore as the seas rose when the ice melted.

The bluffs are the cut edge of that glacial pile, exposed where the ocean gnaws at the island's southern side. Because they are made of soft clay rather than hard rock, they erode quickly, reshaping year by year, which is both what makes them dramatic and why the edges are dangerous. Boulders that tumble from the cliff litter the beach below.

Above the bluffs stands the Southeast Light, a red brick lighthouse with an attached keeper's house, built in 1875 to warn ships off this hazardous corner of the island. Its Victorian Gothic design makes it one of the handsomest lighthouses in New England.

By the 1990s erosion had brought the cliff edge so close that the entire lighthouse was in danger of falling into the sea. In a remarkable feat of engineering in 1993, the whole structure was jacked up and moved about 300 feet back from the eroding edge, saving it. That the light still stands is a direct result of the same erosion that makes the bluffs so striking.

A long wooden staircase, rebuilt over the years and running well over a hundred steps, descends the bluff to the beach below. The climb back up is the real workout, so visitors are wise to save energy for it, but the reward is a wild shoreline of clay, cobbles, and fallen boulders with the cliffs towering overhead.

The beach is undeveloped, with no services and no lifeguards, and the surf can be strong, so it suits walking, tide-pooling, and taking in the scale of the place more than casual swimming. For many visitors, simply standing at the cliff-top overlook, with the ocean falling away beneath, is the whole experience.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.