There are now some excellent projects dedicated to uncovering the stories of Scotland’s witch hunts. The University of Edinburgh has an online database （witches.shca.ed.ac.uk） which led me to discover the witches named in this book. I was moved to find names of women there who were killed on the same day, and who were likely related to each other—mothers, daughters, and sisters, executed together. Although historical information is scant, the good research resources out there pointed me to numerous cases whereby an accusation made against a single person led to additional accusations. The person accused was often tortured—even when it was outlawed—which, reading between the lines, caused them to “confess” to cavorting with the devil and to accuse others of doing the same.
I came across cases of accused individuals buying their way out of execution, suggesting that it was the most vulnerable and voiceless in society who were led to the gallows. Women were not even allowed to be witnesses at their own trials. In his book Daemonologie （1582）， King James VI suggests repeatedly that women, as the “weaker vessel,” were more likely to be deceived by the devil. It is hard to read the witch fervor that flooded Europe for centuries as anything less than misogyny. “Witch” continues to be a gendered term, aimed entirely at females.
I stayed on the Isle of Bute in Scotland several times to write this book, and discovered that a Bute woman named Amy Hyndman had been convicted of witchcraft in March 1662. Although Lòn Haven is a fictional island, I based it partly on Bute. Amy is mentioned in the Highland Papers, a now-digitized historical record that reports on numerous witch trials. Amy is mentioned once; she was named by another woman who had been accused. As with almost all of the witch trials, Amy is voiceless and vulnerable, and I wanted to imagine her story as it may have been.
As I wrote I came across other efforts dedicated to telling the story of Scotland’s witches. One of them is the Witches of Scotland project （witchesofscotland.com）， a campaign for justice initiated by Claire Mitchell QC and Zoe Venditozzi, who are engaged in attempting to secure a legal pardon, apology, and national monument for the people who were accused and convicted under the Witchcraft Act. Quite rightly, they point out that while there are statues around Scotland commemorating many individuals, mostly men and—bizarrely—a bear, there isn’t a single statue dedicated to those who were accused and killed on false charges of witchcraft. At Edinburgh Castle, a plaque at the Witches’ Well marks the spot where some three hundred people were executed—but there is not a single name, and certainly no monument.
Although the stories of Scotland’s witches are from a distant past, they feel remarkably of the moment. The #MeToo movement, the depiction of then presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as a witch on social media in 2016, and the arrests of women at the vigil held for a woman who was murdered by a man while walking home from a friend’s house in London represent a brutal and silencing incursion against women that, for many, echo the witch hunts of the distant past. For me, Amy’s story from the 1600s echoes in the 2000s. It is my sincere hope we can change the narrative in the future.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Alice Lutyens, Danielle Perez, Deborah Schneider, Sophie Burks, Kimberley Young, Loren Jaggers, Jessica Plummer, Candice Coote, Luke Speed, Felicity Denham, Sarah Bance, Sophie Macaksill, and Andrew Davis, my sincere and indebted thanks for everything you’ve done to help create this book with me. I am eternally grateful to work with such talented, dedicated, and patient individuals.
Thanks to Emma Heatherington and her partner, Jim McKee, for advising on mural painting, and to Helen Stew for advice on social services—all errors are mine.
Thanks to Fez Inkwright for her book Folk Magic and Healing: An Unusual History of Everyday Plants （Liminal 11, 2019） and Alice Tarbuck for her book A Spell in the Wild: A Year and Six Centuries of Magic （Two Roads, 2020）—both proved useful while researching this book. All errors are my own.
To Kris Haddow for pointing me in the direction of Witchcraft and Superstitious Record in the South-Western District of Scotland by J. Maxwell Wood.
To my colleagues at the University of Glasgow: Elizabeth Reeder, Zoe Strachan, Sophie Collins, Colin Herd, Louise Welsh, and especially Jen Hadfield, for teaching me about the home scar.