Families answer island call to boost numbers

MORE than 20 families have answered an appeal from islanders on Canna to help boost the 21-strong population.

Residents are looking for new neighbours to move into a cottage that is being renovated after lying empty for more than 20 years.

When the deadline for applications ended last week, 22 families had made inquiries, including four from outside the UK and one from as far away as Bulgaria. A shortlist will be drawn up next month and the three-bedroom MacIssacs Cottage, currently being restored following donations from members of the National Trust for Scotland patrons' club, will be ready by March.

However the family needs to be either employed or self-employed as there are no jobs on the island.

Deb Baker, secretary of Canna Community Association, said the island has broadband, so remote working might be an option, while there may be opportunities for someone in the arts, crafts, tourism or fishing industries. She said islanders are particularly keen to attract a family with young children to boost numbers in the island's small primary school which currently has four pupils.

Baker said: "We have been very pleased with the response. Given that there is no full-time employment on the island, or pre-existing business attached to the house, the families have to be self supporting.

"We anticipated finding people willing to do this in the current economic climate would be difficult, so we are pleased to have had this number of applications."

Canna is just 4.3 miles long and 1.2 miles wide and is the most westerly of the Small Isles archipelago in the Inner Hebrides which also includes Rum, Muck and Eigg.

It was left to the NTS by the Gaelic folklorist and scholar John Lorne Campbell in 1981, and is run as a farm and conservation area with one of Scotland's most important seabird colonies. It has no major roads, shop, pub or mobile phone coverage, and the nearest doctor is a boat trip away.