Fife is a part of Scotland I’m familiar with. My brother-in-law has lived in Dalgety Bay just outside Edinburgh since the seventies, so I have been there many times over the years. It’s a lovely part of the world and while Scotland is associated with kilts, haggis, the Lough Ness monster and tossing the caber, there is a lot more to it.
The scenery is spectacular, and the Scots are easy to get along with because they’re like the Irish in many ways. They have a sense of humour too.
My wife and I went into a bar in 1979 and she asked me to get her a glass of lager with a dash of lime. I forgot the lime, so I went back up to the counter and asked the barman for a drop. I offered to pay because I knew they charged for it in some of the bars, but he recognised the accent and asked if I was from Ireland? I told him I was, and he said, light-heartedly “That’s OK then, there’s no charge. If you were English, it would cost you five pence.”
I have a friend who also lives in Fife. He’s a recently retired policeman, and we spent some time working together on a project that brought us to several countries around Europe back in the noughties. Mark always seemed normal to me, but he never told me about his ancestors. I need to talk to him about them because they obviously had issues.
According to official records from the Fife Council, approximately 3,500 women were executed as witches in Scotland between 1560 and 1727. Some estimates even put that figure as high as 6,000 during a period when Europe was gripped by an anti-witch hysteria.
I don’t remember hearing any of this when I was growing up, but there was a time when witch-hunting was big business. While I was writing a piece about sleep deprivation a few weeks ago, I discovered that witch hunters scoured the land looking for suspects and when they caught them, they tortured them until they got a confession.
Sleep deprivation was one of the methods used. The suspected witches were kept awake for days until they eventually began to hallucinate and whatever they said while they were rambling was used as evidence to convict them at their trials.
According to Julian Goodare in National Geographic, the Scots believed that during the late 1500s, the devil was at work in the land and was known for his ability to create storms, kill livestock, and spread deadly illness. Satan sought to undermine human society from within and was recruiting secret agents to do his bidding. These people were witches, and the authorities believed they had to be eradicated for the sake of the kingdom.
And eradicated they were. Out of a population of roughly a million people, about 2,500 accused witches, most of them women, were executed.
The typical stereotype of an accused witch was an elderly, quarrelsome female and many were nominated as suspects by neighbours who just didn’t like them. Those women would be interrogated and forced to name accomplices, who would then be accused of having made a pact with the devil.
There were male witches too, but it was more difficult to convict them. They had to do something specific in order to be charged with witchcraft which explains why 85 percent of the convicted witches were female. Not a lot of evidence was required for women and sometimes they were simply identified as witches by virtue of having a mark like a scar, a mole, a cyst or maybe even just a skin tag.
This was interpreted as the “devil’s mark”, made by contact with the devil when sealing his pact with a witch. That was enough to bring them in for interrogation and a dose of sleep deprivation which was the most common method of torture. The confused and terrified women would readily admit to anything just to get out of their predicament.
In most European countries, witches were burned at the stake, but the Scots were more humanitarian and preferred to strangle suspected witches first. They weren’t always so considerate though and on one occasion a crowd killed an accused woman by dragging her to the beach, where they placed a door on top of her and piled stones on top of it until she died.
Another enterprising lady struck a deal with her tormentors to avoid the death penalty. Margaret Aitken, the so-called great witch of Balwearie, told them she had a special power to detect other witches. She used that power to travel around Scotland pointing out witches, many of whom were innocent but were put to death on her word alone. She eventually slipped up when she failed to identify one woman whom she had previously fingered, and she was uncovered as a fraud.
There was another lady called Lilias Adie who was accused of witchcraft and sentenced to burn at the stake but before the brutal execution could be carried out, she died in prison. Possibly from suicide to avoid being strangled and burned at the stake.
Marco Margaritoff wrote about this woman who was terribly mistreated in prison and those who abused her were so afraid she would come back to life, that they locked her in a wooden box rather than a coffin. Her body was buried along the seashore in Fife, and to ensure that the devil did not reactivate her body, the grave was covered with a half-ton slab of stone.
That didn’t stop relic hunters though who still managed to rob the remains of Lilias Adie in 1852, and those remains are still missing. She was only in her late 50s or early 60s when she died.
Great article Trevor.
Thanks Mick