Perhaps about 10,000 years ago the first wandering people camped in the parish of Edderton. They were hunter gatherers, living off the wild animals they hunted, the shell fish they gathered and the wild berries they collected in their season. Later some settled and built the hut circles that are at Ardvannie, Leachonich, Bogrow and elsewhere. Many of these must have been destroyed when the land was cleared for farming in the 1800's. The hut circles that are still there today are all sited on land that is not too high up and is dry. They buried their dead near these sites in 'cists', graves lined with stone slabs Sometimes the dead were placed sitting in these cists along with things that they had used in life - flint arrow heads, pots, beads. These were the Neolithic people and they had only stone tools to work with.

Nevertheless they in their time built the great chambered cairns, of which there are a dozen or so in the parish. These have a burial space in the centre, lined with stone slabs, andd then covered by about 100 tonnes of stones, which must have been gathered by hand from the surrounding land. They are all built in sites with a commanding view of the surrounding countryside and usually amongst the hut circles and field systems of earlier times. Some seem to have been built so that they were within sight of each other, evenn though up to six kilometres apart.

It could have been about 4 - 5000 years ago that the Stone Circle and Standing Stone were erected in the Stony Field near the village to act as a calendar. These were wise people who worked out the movements of sun and moon and then with this calendar determined the approach of the seasons and thus the time to sow the crops. Centuries later, and well into the Bronze Age, skilled people built the three brochs in the parish. These were beautiful round tapered buildings, standing some13 metres high and 20 metres wide at the base. They are now just heaps of stones for they have been robbed over the years to provide stone for building other houses and steadings.

2000 years ago the Edderton people can be recognised as Picts. They carved the salmon and the symbols on the Standing Stone and later erected the Cross Slabs which are in the graveyard. These were difficult times for the Dornoch Firth was to be a frontier zone between the Vikings pushing South from Sutherland, seeking good land and timber, and the Picts, determined to defend their land and their homes. A fierce battle was fought at Carrieblair and it is said that the 'Danish' (Viking?) prince was killed and buried their but it is not known who won the battle.

The story of Edderton continues on through the merging of the Picts with the Scots, Vikings and others to form the clans and the gradual clearing of the land to make farms and crofts. Great changes took place in the early 1800's with large farms being formed on the lowground and the displacement from these lands of the small tenants. They had to move to the higher, poorer land which is now under crofting tenure. Their work is recorded in the fields that they created and then tilled with great skill, and in the croft houses, or the remains of them, that they built with their own hands.