Field Visit
Date 4 July 1925
Event ID 553405
Category Recording
Type Field Visit
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/553405
Cashel (?) Sgor nam Ban–naomha ("Skerry of the Holy Women").
The southern coast of Canna is precipitous and indented, presenting to the sea a bulwark of upper and lower cliffs separated by a steep grassy slope, which rises in most places from a terrace. One of these terraces, situated at a very exposed part of the coast about 2 ¼ miles west of the bridge connecting Sanday with Canna, bears the remains of what may be a Cashel or monastic settlement of Celtic type; the place-name of the cliff beneath which it lies is, in English, "the skerry of the holy women", and it is inferred that the establishment was a nunnery. The site is peculiarly remote, basaltic escarpments effectually isolating it from the landward, while access from the sea is only possible in the finest weather. The terrace is covered with turf, is 50 to 70 yards in breadth and is fairly level; it is strewn with detritus of the upper cliff, which has afforded a convenient building material. The construction consists of an enclosure about 40 yards in diameter formed by a wall of drystone building 5 feet in thickness, the entrance lying on the southern, the seaward side; in the construction of this wall advantage has been taken of rock outcrops and fallen boulders to economise labour, and on this account the shape is irregular, rather ear-shaped than circular.
Within the enclosure (Fig. 307) four structures are built against the outer wall, and there are three others free-standing, while a dense growth of bracken possibly conceals the remains of others. The masonry is built dry throughout.
Without excavation little can be said of the buildings, but two of the structures reared against the outer wall were respectively the well-house and the mill. Within the former a spring rises in a basin of masonry, and there is also an external access to the well, possibly secondary. The water runs southward in a surface channel, then dips below ground to reappear in the bottom of the mill-house, where it is joined by another spring entirely subterranean. The mechanism of the mill probably resembled that of the horizontal mills of Shetland (1), and the mill-house is similar in type to one on the island of Taransay, Harris (NB00SW 3) ; in the upper part is an aumbry, a feature found in the north-western structure also.
The largest and most complete of the freestanding buildings stands near the centre of the enclosure; it is two chambered. The larger chamber is some 16 feet in diameter within walls 3 feet in thickness, and is built of larger stones than the other structures. Of equal dimensions is a single chambered structure next the mill, which is D-shaped on plan; within it is a low circular platform, either building or debris supporting a low rectangular erection containing a number of stone pounders and a fragment of a saddle quern. This is marked on the O.S. map as ‘Old Altar’ (2).
(1) Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., XX., p. 257, footnote. (2) Cf. Ibid., XXXIII., p. 133.
RCAHMS 1928, visited 4 July 1925.
OS map: Islands of Canna and Sanday (Inverness-shire) lix.
