page_title: Canna, Scotland
section_title: Argyll
hierarchical_section_title: Canna, Scotland / History / Argyll
caption_attribution_description: English: Coroghon Castle, Canna, Inner Hebrides.
context_page_description: 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 4.3 miles long and 1 mile wide. The isolated skerries of Hyskeir and Humla lie 6.2 miles south-west of the island.
  The islands were left to the National Trust for Scotland by their previous owners, the Gaelic folklorists and 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, contains John Campbell's important archives of Gaelic materials that were donated with the islands to the nation. Since then the NTS 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 NTS would be devolving to the island community the responsibility for attracting and retaining new residents on the island.
context_section_description: By the early 17th century, the Bishopric of the Isles was held by presbyterians, for whom the office of Bishop had a questionable status. In 1626, Thomas Knox, the Bishop, appears to have replaced Clan Ranald (who relunctantly accepted the reformation) as his tenants, with the MacLeods of Raasay (active supporters of the reformation). At the end of his life, in 1627, Thomas Knox sold Canna to the Earl of Argyll, one of the most powerful Covenanters. Under pressure from the Earl, shrieval authority transferred from Inverness to the sheriff of Argyll, which was under the control of the Earl's family.
  In 1641, following the outbreak of civil war, king Charles I promised to give Canna to the Baronet of Sleat, since the Earl of Argyll's treason (as one of the king's main opponents) would make Canna forfeit; the king's subsequent defeat made this promise moot. In 1654, the war having ended, the Earl of Argyll leased Canna back to Clan Ranald. In the following year, Donald MacDonald, the son of the Clan Ranald leader, married the Baronet's daughter, Janet, quelling any potential dispute over the island.
  In 1666, following Janet's death, Donald married Marion MacLeod of Harris, but by 1680 he was seeking a divorce, accusing her of adultery. At some point in the late 17th century, a small prison (now called "Coroghon Castle") was constructed on the side of an isolated stack at Coroghon; it was described by Thomas Pennant in 1772 as "a lofty slender rock, that juts into the sea: on one side is a little tower, at a vast height above us, accessible by a narrow and horrible path: it seems so small as scarce to be able to contain half a dozen people. Tradition says, that it was built by some jealous regulus, to confine a handsome wife in".
  Donald had succeeded to the leadership of Clan Ranald in 1670, and in 1672 was give a new charter of Lairdship for Canna by the new Earl of Argyll. A decade later, Argyll's Rising caused the Earl's feudal authority to be forfeit, making Clan Ranald direct vassals of the king. In 1686, Donald died, and was buried on Canna.
caption: Ruins of Coroghon Castle on top of the stack at Coroghon
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