It has only one inhabited location, Weddell Settlement, with a single digit population engaged in sheep farming and tourism services.

The island offers walks to wildlife watching sites and scenery destinations including some spectacular landscapes featuring the famous Falklands stone runs.

It is a remote place, infrequently visited by a resupply ship and occasionally by private yachts, accessible by air with a short (some 200 km (120 mi)) if expensive flight from the Falklands capital, Stanley.

Weddell's book A Voyage Towards the South Pole documented, inter alia, certain events and persons of local history, including his running across the privateer David Jewett and the former castaway Charles Barnard.

[12] The island was discovered in 1766 by the British navigator and accomplished military commander John MacBride during the first hydrographic survey of the Falklands archipelago carried out by his ship HMS Jason out of Port Egmont, the early British settlement situated on Saunders Island off the northwest coast of West Falkland.

James Cook, who surveyed and mapped South Georgia but did not visit the Falklands, based his 1777 chart of the islands on MacBride's one, inheriting some of its specific characteristics.

[5][29] On the local conditions for survival, American sealer Edmund Fanning reviewed the available sources of food and fuel to conclude in his memoirs: In fact, a person would be able to subsist at the Falkland Islands for a considerable length of time, without experiencing any great degree of suffering.

Second, the sealers preferred to keep some distance away from the Spanish settlement of Puerto Soledad (present Port Louis) situated at the opposite extremity of the archipelago, about 175 nmi (324 km) away by sea.

Charles Barnard got marooned in the area from 11 June 1813 to 25 November 1814, together with four sailors – Jacob Green (American), and Joseph Albrook, James Louder and Samuel Ansel (Britons), accompanied by the captain's most helpful dog named Cent, and in possession of a 6.6 m (22 ft) whaleboat.

The castaways built several shelters on Weddell (Swan Island to them) while hunting feral hogs and collecting drift wood for subsistence.

Under the circumstances, one of them, Ansel, developed an aggressive attitude and was temporarily exiled by his companions to survive alone at Quaker Harbour from 28 December 1813 to 16 February 1814.

In the vicinity of his tussac-built bivouac, the graves and headstones of two men were found a mile up the bay who, Barnard reasoned, must have been buried long since, as the letters were almost effaced from the stones.

Certain inaccuracies in Weddell's retelling of events and his attempt at embellishing his compatriots’ motives for taking over Barnard's ship Nanina and claiming it as a prize of the War of 1812 (subsequently, Barnard appealed successfully against the London prize court judgement and got his ship restored to him),[35] probably prompted the American to write his Narrative of Sufferings and Adventures book published in 1829.

On 5 June 1982, while en route from Falkland Sound to Chatham Harbour, the diesel-electric submarine HMS Onyx commanded by Lt. Cdr.

While the former is located at the same geographic latitude in the Southern Hemisphere as that of London (not the Faroes) in the Northern and, accordingly, the Nordic archipelago lies over 1,100 kilometres (680 mi) nearer than Weddell to the relevant geographical pole, as far as temperatures are concerned that is compensated by the climatic influences of the cold water Falklands Current and the warm water Norwegian Current respectively.

On top of the gneiss and granite lie layers of quartzite, sandstone, and shales or mudstone in West Falkland and adjacent areas including Weddell Island.

Cross-bedding and ripple marks identify the zone where these rocks were deposited as the shallow waters of a delta environment where currents transported submarine sediments.

The erosion of particular rock varieties caused by myriad freezing-thawing cycles taking place in periglacial conditions during the last Ice Age produced the dramatic stone runs,[55][56] one of the most enigmatic features of the local landscape originally noted by Bougainville's naturalist Antoine-Joseph Pernety in 1764: We have not been less astonished at the sight of the innumerable quantity of stones of all sizes, overthrown on each other, and yet arranged, as if they had been piled up carelessly to fill gullies.

[57]The young Darwin, who visited and explored the Falklands twice, in March 1833 and March–April 1834, wrote: In many parts of the island the bottoms of the valleys are covered in an extraordinary manner by myriads of great loose angular fragments of the quartz rock, forming ‘streams of stones.’ These have been mentioned with surprise by every voyager since the time of Pernety.

[58]The Falkland Islands and Vitosha Mountain in Europe feature probably the most exceptional stone runs in terms of diversity, size and abundance.

They appear in several varieties as stone patches, streams, terraces, fans, stripes and rivers, and are most widespread and voluminous in the Wickham Heights area of East Falkland,[56] where the largest of them extend over 5 km (3.1 mi).

[60] Exotic wildlife, including skunks, rheas, parrots and guanacos were introduced in the early 1930s by the then owner of the island John Hamilton[61] (and brought in from Chile on board his ship Penelope), along with Patagonian foxes.

[65] Other species considered for possible eradication from Weddell include the house mice and the feral cats,[65] most likely introduced to the Falklands by early sealing expeditions.

[64] Germplasm collection from Weddell Island sites was carried out by the Alaska Plant Materials Center in 1998 for the purposes, among others, of possible tussac grass restoration projects in the Falklands.

[77] In the course of the 19th century, sealing declined due to depletion of stocks and gave way to sheep farming as the mainstay of Falklands economy, a role shared with fishing, tourism and offshore hydrocarbon exploration.

[79] All these activities take place northeast of the line linking New Year Cove on the southeast to Kelp Creek House on the northwest.

Along with a diverse and abundant local wildlife, the island's tourist attractions include also some spectacular landscapes featuring the famous Falklands stone runs[80] that excited Charles Darwin's interest[58][81] and became the subject of much debate on their origins.

Wind turbines and solar panels, supplemented by diesel generators, supply electric energy to four houses in Weddell Settlement.

Sea transportation is serviced by a 50-meter wooden pier in Weddell Settlement, at the head of Gull Harbour, with a ramp being presently set up.

Probably the most remarkable Weddell Island ship was the wooden two-masted cutter Feuerland (the German for Tierra del Fuego), originally sailed from Europe to Punta Arenas by the German naval aviator and WWI war hero Gunther Plüschow, and used as an expedition ship supporting his pioneering aerial survey of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.