The hike down from Rodmans Hollow leads you through one of Block Island's most dramatic landscapes: a glacial depression carved 20,000 years ago, now thick with scrub oak and shadbush. The trail winds past kettleholes and stone walls built by farmers who abandoned this terrain to the wind. When you finally glimpse the ocean, it's through a frame of swaying switchgrass, the shore appearing almost accidental at the base of eroding bluffs.
“This is Block Island's only glacial hollow accessible by trail, where ancient geological drama meets an utterly unmanicured coastline.”
Credit: PexelsRodmans Hollow Shore — photo by Edwardo Calles
The beach itself is all cobblestone and wave-tumbled rock, the kind that shifts and rumbles with each surge. Driftwood lodges between boulders the size of wine barrels. Offshore, the water churns in shades of slate and moss-green, its temperature hovering in the fifties even in August. This is not a place for languid swimming; it's for tide-pooling, for photographing the striations in the clay cliffs, for feeling the full weight of the Atlantic against your shins.
You'll have the shoreline mostly to yourself—most Block Island visitors never venture beyond the harbor beaches. The Hollow itself is protected by The Nature Conservancy, which means no development, no refreshment stands, no volleyball nets. Just the wheeling of gulls overhead and the persistent smell of rockweed drying on stone. Bring layers; the wind here doesn't negotiate.
