page_title: Canna, Scotland
section_title: Prehistory
hierarchical_section_title: Canna, Scotland / History / Prehistory
caption_attribution_description: English: Souterrain, Canna Evidence of later prehistoric settlement on Canna. It is not known if it was used for storage or for burial purposes.
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: 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.
caption: Neolithic cellars on Canna[note 1]
exif: {}