Canna hosts symposium on connections to St Columba

Thought to have been inhabited since 5000BC, the small island of Canna to the south-west of Skye will be the location of a one-day symposium entitled ‘The Columba Connection’ this year. Organised by the National Trust for Scotland’s Canna House Archives, the event will feature a programme of academic papers, guided walks and musical events, to be delivered in the appropriately named St Columba’s Chapel, the island’s Shearing Shed community space and in Canna House Garden.

Canna was bought in 1938 by Gaelic scholar John Lorne Campbell and his wife Margaret Fay Shaw, who donated it to the Trust in 1981. Over the course of their lives, as well as farming the island, they amassed one of the world’s most important collections of Gaelic and Celtic folklore, song, story and image archives.

The Columba Connection/Ceangal Choluim-Chille/Cónasc Cholm Cille symposium will take place on St Columba’s day itself (9 June). It also marks 80 years since the Campbells’ purchase of Canna. The couple hoped to re-establish a traditional Gaelic-speaking Hebridean community, based around the church, farm and school.

John firmly believed that Canna was once the ‘summer home’ of St Columba and was the noted Hinba referred to in Columba’s papers. The archaeology points towards a monastic presence on the island at the time of St Columba.

The Chair of Celtic Languages, Literature, History and Antiquities at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Rob Dunbar, will deliver a keynote speech on the historical links between Columba, Canna and the Campbells. Brian McGee, Bishop of Argyll and the Isles, will be in attendance at the event to give a blessing at the Celtic cross.

Trust archaeologist Derek Alexander will deliver the archaeological evidence for Columba’s presence on the island; the Canna rangers will conduct guided walks around the island; and Canna archivist Fiona J Mackenzie will perform some of the songs collected by the Campbells.

Proposals to deliver an afternoon paper are invited from interested parties by Monday 9 April on the theme Bho Eirinn gu Alb’ ar lochran ‘s ar n-earbs’ (From Eire to Alba, our torch and our guide), a line from the popular Laoidh Choluim Chille (St Columba’s Hymn).

More information on the symposium – and proposals for papers – is available from Fiona Mackenzie on fmackenzie@nts.org.uk or 01687 462473.