Gaelic collections and heritage
To say that Canna has a rich Gaelic heritage is an understatement.
Canna House is home to an extraordinary archive of Gaelic and Hebridean folk songs, poetry, stories, photos, papers, publications and research, assembled by previous owners John Lorne Campbell and Margaret Fay Shaw.
Canna’s own landscapes, buildings and place names also tell fascinating stories about Gaelic and Hebridean heritage. Ways of life such as farming, crofting and fishing are still very much alive here and certainly not confined to the archives, while the island’s artists and crafters continue to draw inspiration from its heritage, nature and traditional practices.
With such an abundance of Gaelic heritage associated with Canna (Canaigh, in Gaelic), including the thousands of recordings and photos in the Canna House Collection, it can be difficult to know where to begin. We’ve highlighted four (often overlapping) themes to look out for, even if you’re not a Gaelic speaker.
Music, songs and poetry
John Lorne Campbell and Margaret Fay Shaw collected and preserved a huge archive of traditional Gaelic music, folk songs and poetry, making hundreds of transcriptions and recordings from the 1930s onwards. Some were recorded on Canna; others were recorded further afield in Barra, South Uist, Argyll and even Nova Scotia.
You can hear around 2,000 of these recordings on the Tobar an Dualchais (Kist o Riches) website, a treasure trove of Gaelic and Scots audio material that brings together not just the Trust’s Canna House Collection, but also major collections belonging to the University of Edinburgh and the BBC.
The Canna House Collection recordings on the site range from waulking songs (sung while shrinking woven cloth) to love songs to strange rhymes that mimic local birds. You can browse or you can use the website’s search feature to find specific singers or genres.
The original Webster wire recorder that John Campbell used in the 1940s to make some of these recordings is still conserved in the Library at Canna House. You can view it, along with some of the collection of rare Gaelic texts and first editions, on guided tours of Canna House, which reopens in 2025 after a major conservation project.
Stories and folklore
The Canna House recordings on Tobar an Dualchais also include numerous stories, in Scots and English as well as Gaelic. Some are folklore, telling about encounters with fairies or mythical creatures; others are anecdotes about Canna and Hebridean life, such as going to a wedding on the nearby island of Muck. There are very good English summaries of the stories and tales for non-Gaelic speakers.
Additional places to find stories of Canna life and Gaelic heritage are in John Lorne Campbell’s diaries, as well as the Trust’s web stories about the Canna House archives and our charity’s work to research and conserve them.
Although some of the recordings are scratchy and take some deciphering, they weave a colourful tapestry of people’s lives on Canna and elsewhere.
Read more about the archives
For more current stories, the social media channels of the Trust team and community on Canna are good places to start.
Traditional skills and industries
Running throughout the Gaelic recordings and papers in the Canna House archives are stories and insights about traditional Hebridean industries, from fishing to textile production to livestock-rearing. These are also captured in Margaret Fay Shaw’s photographs, which document the culture and traditions of the islands over several decades. Her archive contains over 1,000 pictures, many taken in South Uist as well as Canna, showing crofters, weavers, fishermen, farmers, pipers and others at work or at home.
You’ll find some of these photos around the Trust’s website. They also feature in Margaret’s book Folksongs and Folklore of South Uist, and in some of John’s publications. In addition, as part of our work to care for and share the archive, the Trust makes material available, where possible, to researchers, filmmakers and exhibitions, such as the Glean: Early 20th-century Women Filmmakers and Photographers exhibition in Edinburgh in 2023.
Many Gaelic traditions are still in evidence today. For example, the Trust’s farm manager uses a low-impact farming approach, with minimal machinery and chemicals, that is rooted in traditional methods passed down through the generations and an inherited understanding of the past.
Land management on Canna is conservation-led, with the farm manager and ranger working closely together to balance habitats for livestock-rearing and conservation of wildlife such as corncrakes.
Meanwhile, Café Canna, which published its own recipe book last year, and Tighard, Canna’s guesthouse with magnificent views over the bay, both use locally sourced food that would have been familiar throughout the centuries on the island: meat from animals raised on the island, eggs from the farm, vegetables grown in the garden, seafood from the waters around Canna, and seaweed from the shoreline.
Nature and landscapes
Finally, Canna’s Gaelic heritage is all around you when you visit. As soon as you step off the boat, you can see this heritage in the buildings, farm, crofts, archaeological sites and churches, including St Columba’s Chapel – still in use as a church today.
Especially evocative are Canna’s Gaelic place names, many of them reflecting the importance of nature, wildlife, folklore and weather to islanders over the centuries. There’s Blàr nam Faoileann (Seagull Lea), Creag nan Seagairean (Kittiwake Crag), Leum an Dobhrain (Otter’s Leap), Rubha Bean Sithean (Fairywife’s Point), Sgeirean nan Ròn (Seal Skerry), Cnoc nan Còrr (Heron’s Mound), and the beautifully named Eilean Ghreannabric (Sun-mottle Island). You’ll find these, and other place names that keep Canna’s heritage alive, in a Gaelic map created by artist Hanna Tuulikki, in collaboration with islander Winnie MacKinnon and others; it’s on sale in Canna’s community shop.
Canna House opens for pre-booked, guided tours from spring 2025, and will include the Library and Margaret Fay Shaw’s study, as well as the Sitting Room and Billiard Room. Researchers may also be able to access the archives and collections by appointment.