Canna (; ) is the westernmost of the Small Isles archipelago, in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. It is linked to the neighbouring island of Sanday by a road and sandbanks at low tide. The island is long and wide. The isolated skerries of Hyskeir and Humla lie south-west of the island.
The islands were left to the National Trust for Scotland by their previous owners, the highly important Celtic studies scholars John Lorne Campbell and Margaret Fay Shaw, in 1981, and are run as a farm and conservation area. Canna House, one of two big houses on the island (the other being Tighard), contains Shaw and Campbell's important archives of Scottish Gaelic literature, folklore, and folk song materials that were donated with the islands to the nation. Since then the National Trust has engaged in new initiatives to attract new residents and visitors to Canna. However, these initiatives have enjoyed only limited success, and in December 2017 it was announced that the trust would be devolving to the island community the responsibility for attracting and retaining new residents.
Facilities There are some 20 buildings on Canna and Sanday, including three churches, one of which has been deconsecrated (see below). There is also a post office which was converted from a garden shed. The Canna tea room, which closed in 2008, reopened in 2010 as the Gille Brighde Cafe and Restaurant. This restaurant closed in 2013 but has since re-opened again as Cafe Canna. A new resident manager for the island was appointed in 2010. The island is isolated and in the past inhabitants have had to buy all their provisions from the mainland, but it now has a small unstaffed shop operated on an 'honesty' basis. There is a telephone link, a red telephone box and broadband internet access, although there is no mobile phone coverage. Electricity is provided by a diesel generator, at mainland voltage and frequency, and there is a private water supply. In 2010 a proposal to establish a fish farm off Canna was defeated in a residents' ballot, even though it would have created a number of new jobs.
The island has a very low crime rate, but a mainland-based police officer visits the island twice a year, mainly to inspect gun licences. A doctor based on the neighbouring island of Skye is available for house calls once a month. The roads on Canna are not metalled and are privately owned; local vehicles therefore do not require vehicle excise duty (road tax). The previous footbridge to Sanday was destroyed by storms during 2005, and was replaced by a road bridge in 2006. This allowed vehicular access to Sanday at all tide levels for the first time, although the road on Sanday was still covered by high tides until, following a 2017 appeal to raise funds, a new road was completed in 2018."The Internet Guide to Scotland: Canna" scotland-inverness.co.uk. Retrieved 18 July 2008."Westword" road-to-the-isles.org.uk. Retrieved 18 July 2008.
Geology In contrast to neighbouring Rùm, the geology of Canna is very much a layered sequence of basalt lava flows of Palaeocene age, all ascribed to the Canna Lava Formation. Many are of hawaiitic composition. Within the lower half of the succession there are also coarse conglomerates deposited by rivers The island is traversed by numerous normal faults most of which run broadly north–south. Basalt dykes ascribed to the North Britain Palaeogene Dyke Suite are seen in the east of the island. Quaternary deposits include glacial till of limited extent around Tarbert and screes which are found beneath various of the small basalt cliffs. Pleistocene and Holocene raised beach deposits are frequent around Canna's coastline, some being late glacial and others post-glacial in age.
Wildlife Canna is renowned for its wildlife, including sea eagles, golden eagles and puffins. Recently, peregrine falcons and merlins have also been sighted. The island is also inhabited by a number of rare butterfly species. In the nearby waters one can spot dolphins and smaller whales.
Canna is noted for its tiers of basalt pillars that rise over the eastern half of the island and the sea cliffs that dominate its northern shore. The highest point on the island is Càrn a' Ghaill (Scottish Gaelic for "rocky hill of the storm") at . Another point of interest is Compass Hill. Its peak is at and sits on the eastern edge of the island. It is made of volcanic rock called tuff, and it has such a high iron content that the compass of nearby ships are distorted, pointing to the hill rather than north.
History
Prehistory
Canna is littered with numerous pottery sherds evidencing the island's occupation in the Neolithic era, along with a small number of mysterious cellars dug into the ground. A distinctively shaped standing stone is found at Keill, around which a local legend has grown: according to the legend, when people on Canna were badly behaved, they would be punished by having their thumb jammed into a particular hole in the stone, at about 6'4" above ground level (hence the stone's name - the "punishment stone").
Bronze Age remains are some of the most extensive in the North-Western Highlands, particularly at the western end of the island; these include fragments of huts arranged in circles, and ancient field walls, as well as pottery artefacts from the Beaker Culture. In the Iron Age a hillfort - Dun Channa - was constructed at the far western edge of Canna; another was probably constructed at the eastern edge, at Coroghon, in the same period.
Early Christian period
In the 6th century, when the Irish missionary Columba first sailed to Iona, he first arrived at the island of Hinba, which he later treated to as a place of contemplative retreat. The extensive early Christian sculptures and structures on Canna, and its traditional association with Iona, have made many consider it to be the otherwise unidentified Hinba."Ernan" Catholic Encyclopedia. Retrieved 9 December 2007. However, Adomnán (the chronicler of the life of Columba) noted that Brendan the Navigator stopped at Hinba while travelling from Ireland to Iona; Canna is a most unlikely landfall on such a journey as it is well beyond the destination.Adomnan of Iona, (tr. & ed. Richard Sharpe) (1995) Life of St Columba. Penguin
At Keill are two large richly decorated Celtic crosses, dating from the 8th to 9th centuries, which are thought to attest to the presence of a monastery. A cursing stone, was located at the site; a device normally associated with Ireland, this only the second cursing stone ever to be found in Scotland.
On the south coast of the island are the remains of a small, isolated, cashel-like building, which would have been difficult to supply with provisions, except by sea. In Gaelic the site is known as Sgorr nam Ban-naomha, meaning "grassy slope of the holy women"; in the 19th century, local people believed it had once been a nunnery,Rixson (2001) pp. 31-34 but it is now thought to have been a hermitage, associated with the monastery at Keill. The enclosure contains three carved stones, bearing crosses, and was once believed to have had a healing spring.
Norse rule
Following raids by the Vikings in the 9th century, the Hebrides became part of the Kingdom of the Isles, a Norwegian crown dependency also known as Suðreyjar ("Southern Isles"). Written records are few, but the Viking occupation of Canna is evident from place names such as the element sgor, gearaid (enclosure), tota (homestead) and Sanday ("sand island") (though the name "Canna" itself may pre-date the Norse period).Rixson (2001) pp. 66-69Mac an Tàilleir (2003) p. 103
A number of large oblong arrangements of kerb-stones throughout the island are thought to possibly indicate Viking ship burials, based on the evidence of similar structures on the Isle of Arran (which was also part of Suðreyjar). The largest is located at Rubha Langan-innis on the north coast, and known in Gaelic as Uaigh Righ Lochlainn (meaning "the grave of the King of Norway"); this is a narrow rectangular structure approximately long by wide on a grassy promontory below the cliffs.Banks (1977) p. 46. calls it a "ship-burial"."Canna, Rubha Langanes" . scotlandsplaces.gov.uk. Retrieved 27 February 2011.
Later accounts imply that the monastery at Keill had been a centre of the Culdees while under Norwegian dominion. In the late 12th century, practical authority in Suðreyjar became split between a number of closely related magnates. In 1203, Ranald, the magnate ruling the portion that contained Iona, invited the Benedictines to establish a new Abbey at Iona; that same year, a papal bull was issued, listing the Island of Canna among the new Abbey's possessions.Rixson (2001) pp. 29-31 It is likely that the previous Abbey of Iona had had some authority over Canna, perhaps even stretching before the Viking era, but the fact that Norse rulers had not always been Christian may have disrupted Iona's authority, and Iona itself may have been deserted by the time Ranald requested a new Abbey.
Church rule under the Scottish king
In 1266, the Treaty of Perth transferred Suðreyjar to the Scottish king, as a set of crown dependencies - rather than merging it into Scotland itself. Geographically, Canna lay within the portion of the former Suðreyjar which had become the MacRory realm of Garmoran (stretching from Uist to the Rough Bounds), but documents relating to Garmoran do treat Canna as part of it, suggesting the island was still under the Abbot's control. The Abbot of Iona thus ruled Canna with considerable power. Nevertheless, at the turn of the century, William I had created the position of Sheriff of Inverness, to be responsible for the Scottish highlands, which theoretically now extended to Canna.Dickinson W.C., The Sheriff Court Book of Fife, Scottish History Society, Third Series, Vol. XII (Edinburgh 1928), pp. 357-360The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland to 1707, K.M. Brown et al eds (St Andrews, 2007-2017), 15 July 1476
During the 1420s, feuding within other fragments of Suðreyjar appears to have spilled onto Canna. The Abbot, Dominicus, obtained papal authority to ban all nobility from setting foot on the island, but this wasn't respected, and Canna had to be temporarily abandoned. In 1428, the Abbot wrote to the Pope requesting that he pronounce a general excommunication against anyone who harmed one of Canna's inhabitants, or damaged their property, claiming: "by reason of wars and other calamities in the past divers homicides, depredations and other ills were perpetrated, so that some strong men of the familiars of the Abbot and convent were slain by pirates and sea rovers, and divers farmers and inhabitants of the island were afraid to reside there".Rixson (2001) p. 94 quoting the Scottish History Society (1956) Calendar of Scottish Supplications to Rome.
The Reformation was rapidly encroaching, however, and after 1498 Iona was transferred to Commendators, rather than Abbots. Canna became a possession of the Bishop of the Isles (also known as the "Bishop of Sodor"; "Sodor" is the traditional anglicisation of Suðreyjar). In 1548, the Dean of the Isles, Donald Monro, conducted a survey of the Bishop's lands and churches, reporting that the island was a: "faire maine land, foure myle lange, inhabit and manurit, with paroche kirke in it, guid for corne, fishing and grassing, with a falcon nest in it, pertines to the Abbot of Colmkill",Monro (1549) no. 103