Kannur district derived its name from the location of its headquarters at Kannur town.The old name 'Cannanore' is the anglicised form of the Malayalam word Kannur. According to one opinion, 'Kannur' is a derivation from Kanathur, an ancient village, the name of which survives even today in one of the wards of Kannur Municipality.Kannur was an important port on the Arabian Sea which carried out trade with Persia and Arabia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and it was the British military headquarters on India's west coast up to 1887. In conjunction with her elder sister Tellicherry it was the third biggest city in the western coast of British India in the eighteenth century, next only to Bombay and Karachi. Mahe River, which divided the British Tellicherry and French Mahe was then famed as the British Channel of India.
Kannur