Qualla: Canna

Canna: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Van den Bossche, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1981 a Gaelic folklorist named John Lorne Campbell gave the island of Canna and his entire library of Hebridean songs and stories to the National Trust for Scotland. He had owned the island since 1938 and lived on it with his American wife Margaret Fay Shaw, recording the music and oral tradition of the Western Isles for half a century. He kept nothing for himself. By 2021 the population of Canna was fifteen, all of them clustered near the ferry pier at the eastern end of the island. The rest of the four-and-a-half-mile rock and its tidal twin Sanday belong to the sheep, the puffins, and the wind off the Minch.

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Image: Peter Van den Bossche | CC BY-SA 2.0

Canna: The Westernmost Small Isle

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit nschouterden, CC BY 2.0. Canna is the westernmost of the four Small Isles, a long volcanic ridge a few miles north of Rum. The ferry from Mallaig calls on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from April to October, sailing across the Sound of Sleat to Eigg, Muck, Rum, and at last Canna. Fo...

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Image: nschouterden | CC BY 2.0

Canna: Compass Hill

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Van den Bossche, CC BY-SA 2.0. The high point at the eastern end is called Compass Hill, and it deserves the name. The basalt that makes the island is rich in iron, magnetised by the long-ago volcanic event that built the Hebrides. Sailing yachts that come too close to the north coast find their compasses swin...

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Image: Peter Van den Bossche | CC BY-SA 2.0

Canna: John Lorne Campbell's Canna

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Van den Bossche, CC BY-SA 2.0. Campbell bought Canna in 1938, when the island had perhaps two dozen residents and a way of life that was already endangered. With Margaret Fay Shaw, who had spent the 1930s recording songs in South Uist, he began documenting everything: songs in Gaelic, folklore, place names, th...

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Image: Peter Van den Bossche | CC BY-SA 2.0

Canna: The Rocket Church and the Celtic Cross

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Canna's churches accumulate the layers of Hebridean Christianity. A short walk from the pier stands the Rhu Church, completed in 1914 by the Thom family and known locally as the Rocket Church because its replica Celtic round tower looks like it might launch. It is Presbyterian, b...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Canna: Rat-Free Since 2008

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Peter Van den Bossche, CC BY-SA 2.0. Brown rats, the destructive Norwegian variety, arrived on Canna in the 19th century and by the year 2000 had eaten the eggs and chicks of so many ground-nesting seabirds that the puffin colonies, the Manx shearwaters, and the storm petrels were collapsing. In a methodical and pat...

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Image: Peter Van den Bossche | CC BY-SA 2.0