Scottish Witches

Mereswyne

| Allyson Shaw

Spirit Pig

Before moving to Scotland, I was learning what I now call hedgewitchery, riding of metaphysical hedges using trance-work commonly referred to as shamanic journeying. In one journey I was given a piglet to hold and care for. That piglet changed my life. It was not long after this that I found the house in Banff in the Northeast of Scotland where I would write Ashes & Stones.

Piglet or Holy Woman?

The house in Banff was literally a leap of faith—into a new landscape with a history and different languages—Scots and Gaelic—with Doric dialect thrown in the mix. The etymology of the name Banff is contested. Is it derived from the Scottish Gaelic banbh meaning ‘piglet’ or is it a contraction of bean-naomh, Gaelic for ‘holy woman’? 

Dolphins—those misunderstood, exploited people of the sea—are at the centre of this question. They are often spotted off the coastline at Banff, and all along the Northeast coast, dolphins are joyful part of the seascape. In 17th-18th century Scots, a mereswyne—sea pig—was a porpoise or dolphin.

Etymological name-puzzles carry over to Orkney, where I now live.

I am piglet, dragon, cetacean, and woman. What am I? 

Orkney was known to Ptolemy and the Venerable Bede as Orcades, after the Latin orca meaning whale. (There are a lot of Orcas around Orkney.) 

Before 16th century Scots mereswyne, Old English had mereswīn or porpoise. This linguistic link goes back farther still. Before early Modern Scots, before Old English and even before the Norse settlers, there were Iron Age Picts in Orkney called the Orcs. Little remains of their presence save a few expertly carved stones and their name. Orc is a Pictish tribal name meaning young pig. The 9th century Norse settlers met the Picts and either assimilated or destroyed them—no one knows. The settlers saw in the local tribal name Orc their word for seal—orkn. They reinterpreted the name and added eyjar, or islands, to make Orkneyjar—Seal Islands. (There are a lot of seals around Orkney, also.)

Graphic of Pictish stone symbols from the Aberdeenshire Council Website.

The Picts left elaborately carved stones all over Scotland, and some were re-carved with beautiful crosses as they converted to Christianity. The earlier symbols like the crescent and Z rod defy modern understanding, but the animal portraits on the stones show a keen intimacy with the being portrayed—an understanding of the anatomy and movement, of the animal’s presence. The beings on the stones are representations of animals we know today: eagles, boars, deer, bulls, salmon, serpents, bears and others. There’s one exception to this earthly menagerie—the mysterious Pictish ‘beast’. This dragon-like figure is most common on Pictish stones in Northeast Scotland. 

A black and white drawing of a mythical creature with curled 'fins' or legs and a long dragon like snout
Stylised Pictish Beast–Struthious Bandersnatch via wikimedia commons

These stones are rare in Orkney and the Pictish beast is rarer still. In 2016 a violent storm revealed an 8th century Pictish stone wedged in a cliff face in Deerness on the east Mainland. On one side is an elaborately carved Celtic cross, with a Pictish beast on the other. 

a carved stone stands upright in a green field with the ocean in the distance. Pictish symbols decorate the front
Reproduction of the Pictish Stone on Birsay via the Visit Orkney Website

A second Pictish beast was found on a stone on the tidal island of Birsay, carved above another totemic Orkney animal—the sea eagle. Some have argued that the beast is a dragon or kelpie (a water-horse in Scottish folklore), but others see the beast as a dolphin—and I’m inclined to agree.

Marioun

Marioun Pardoun (also named Peblis and Peebles in the record) was executed for the crime of witchcraft in Scalloway in Shetland on the 22nd of March, 1644. She was accused of magically overturning a boat, causing four men to drown. When the bodies were found, Marioun and her husband were required to put their hands on the corpses to determine their innocence. The bodies bled and, in the logic of the time, this proved her guilt. (There is no mention of the husband in the trial record except in Marioun’s tortured reverie.) Details of her ‘waking’ or sleep deprivation were recorded, and her torturers are named—Mans Finlaysone and Jon Erasmussone. The greater the pressure they put on her, the more incoherent her confession became. 

(I translate these words from Helene Willumsen’s transcription of the trial record into contemporary diction.) ‘…when they were waking her she asked where was the husband who was answering her? Speaking concerning her husband, she answered [that] he lay under her head and would not suffer her to confess.’ An accusation is noted in the margin of the trial record: Clothing your spirit with said pellock quaill. A pellock quaill is a dolphin. 

A map of a marine amusement park with several pools for captive animals and tier seats for audiences
A map of the water circus Marineland in the 1980s

Captive

When I was a child I liked to listen to whale and dolphin sounds. I loved their throat songs—the clicking giggles, whistles of joy and foreboding above bass drop of deep water. I had a flexidisc from an issue of National Geographic that I played over and over on my portable turntable. When we moved from the midwest to Southern California, my father took me to Marineland to see some dolphins. It was 1986, a year before the grim place would close for good. Years after my visit, it remained a ruined, graffittied site used by locals as a makeshift skate park until it was developed into a resort. All of this is now sinking into the sea, including the 18th hole at the adjacent Trump golf course. Nostalgic, surreal reveries on Reddit are my only corroborators, with one poster using the phrase ‘fever dream’ to describe their memories of late 80s Marineland. It was once the world’s largest water circus, housing captive dolphins, orcas and seals. Orcas and pilot whales were forced to perform in tiny tanks—their lives often short and tortured. Dolphins leapt through hoops of fire and sea lions were forced to ‘sing’. 

In my recollection, only my father and I are there, standing in wonder before the green murk of the empty ‘shark experience’ tank. We meander through the sun bleached park, around show tanks, their artificial blue depths mirror-still, as if before a storm. I stand alone beside the ‘Dolphin Community Tank’ and a being surfaces. She breathes. I put my hand out and touch the pale grey slip of her forehead. She looks at me and I am in the presence of a spirit clothed with pellock quaill. Her black eye takes me in–looks past to all beyond—over the walls of the park to the wide, bright sea.

Further explorations

A magazine cover showing a young woman looking out a gothic window. She is brewing a potion on her desk

—Tales of Pictish beasts and dolphin transformations inspired my short story, ‘Gald.’  A chance meeting in a post apocalyptic Aberdeenshire changes two young women’s lives forever.  You can read it in Luna Station Quarterly, issue 40—available as a paperback and ebook: https://www.lunastationquarterly.com/issues/040/

—Take a stand against the horrific slaughter of whole pods of pilot whales and dolphins in the annual Grindadráp hunt in the Faroe Islands. Just this month, 291 pilot whales were slaughtered in the village of Leynar, including pregnant females and juveniles. Boycott tourism to the Faroe Islands and encourage others to do so. Put pressure on the Faroe Islands government to put an end to this cruel ‘tradition’ that threatens the future of the pilot whale. Find out more here (warning–this link shows footage of the hunt and contains the graphic and violent animal cruelty of the hunt.) https://seashepherd.org/faroeislands/. If you would like to take action without seeing these images, go to this page to write to officials directly.

—Dolphin photographer with the Whale and Dolphin conservation society Charlie Philips regularly records and posts beautiful images of Dolphins from the Moray Firth on Mastodon

—Laline Paul’s brilliant Pod will haunt you eternally.

—Bad Kharma at Marineland in the L.A. Times: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-17/palos-verdes-peninsula-marineland-ocean-karma-patt-morrison

—Recovery of the Orcadian Pictish stone in Deerness: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-37798080

memory, femicide, and the useful dead 🪶

| Allyson Shaw

revisiting the Janet Horne Memorial Stone on the full moon 🌝

Last month I watched She Will, an impressionistic, feminist horror film about Scottish witches set in the Highlands. Aging film star Veronica Ghent travels to a remote location to convalesce and instead finds herself transformed by the darkness she encounters there.

I missed this film when it came out in 2021, but it’s a cinematic companion to my book about how Scotland remembers the witch hunts. The book is called Ashes & Stones. She Will is a film about memory, femicide and the ‘uses’ of the dead. It is also about confronting past trauma—both personal and historical— while dismantling toxic, predatory masculinity. In the film, as in life, these things happen simultaneously. Yet their relationship remains mysterious in the film: ashes billowing through the air are called ‘witch feathers’ by the locals, and the lore surrounding the land claims the death of women hundreds of years ago gives the earth curative properties.

1940s postcard of the Lairig Ghru Pass in the forest where the film takes place. Printed in Dundee—found on @cornovia_postcards@mstdn.business on Mastodon.

I am intimately familiar with the filming locations of She Will. In the ‘art class scene’ Veronica sits with her easel beside Loch an Eilein in the forest of Rothiemurchus. A boulder inscribed with witch marks lies behind her, off camera. Did the film makers know this? There are legends surrounding the atmospheric, 14th century castle on the island. There was once an underwater, zig-zag causeway linking the island to the shore, though this has never been found. Legend also claims it is the ancestral seat of the Shaw clan in the 14th century—if one believes these things.*

The castle on the island in Loch An Eilein. You could say I was visiting relatives—taken on Christmas Day, 2019

I loved the film’s powerful vision of bonds women share with both the living and dead. It’s also a delicious tale of revenge. I only wished it were longer, and that the character of Desi Hatoum, in a show-stopping performance by Kota Eberhardt, had been given more of a story.

The Janet Horne Memorial Stone in Dornoch is part of the film, transported to a woodland setting. I wrote a piece about the Janet Horne Memorial stone for the Association for Scottish Literature’s online journal, The Bottle Imp in 2019. Did the film makers read it? There is probably no way to know, but I like to think they did.

As part of my research for Ashes & Stones, I repeatedly visited the Janet Horne Memorial Stone. Each time I visited, it was different, surrounded by different tributes that have increased since the book was published. Janet Horne is not the name of the woman who supposedly died near the stone’s present location. Everything we know of her vague story was written down one hundred years after her death, in the notes of English occupiers who wanted to portray Highland Scots as superstitious, backward and unable to rule themselves. She is supposedly the ‘last witch’ executed in Scotland but there is no ‘true story’ of Janet Horne’s life or death, only invention.

In my research I found many photos of the stone through the ages, some from the Dornoch Historical Society and others on the internet without attribution. Here is a gallery.


*This notion is put forth in LOCH AN EILEIN AND ITS CASTLE by Alex Inkson M’Connochie. in The Cairngorm Club Journal 014, 1900. 

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Rife Nights & the stones are out walking

| Allyson Shaw

“…wintering out/ the back end of a bad year…” -Seamus Heaney, “Servant Boy” 

🪨 🌚 🪨 🥃 🪨 🕯️🪨

It’s said that on Hogmanay the Stones of Stenness walk to the loch of Harray for a drink—yet none have witnessed this—perhaps until now…

The first instalment of my field notes on Stenness is up at my Substack. I explore the accused witch Alison Balfour’s relationship to what is now known as the Heart of Neolithic Orkney. This one is for paid subscribers! Become a paid subsciber to read all my Orkney field notes.   📸 Image is a picture I took of the Stones in the snow last January, 2023.

The last Field note from stronsay

| Allyson Shaw

Two years ago I set out a plan to write about the folklore of witchcraft in Orkney and its intersection with the lives of Orcadian women accused of witchcraft. During the witch hunts in Scotland, the people of Orkney were slow to demonise witchcraft and the hunts never reached a full blown panic. There are reasons for this that I might unpack further in another Substack post, but the story of the accused is often eclipsed by legend. Scota Bess on Stronsay is an example of a larger-than-life persona—a mixture of storm witch with elements of a creation goddess. The lived reality of an actual woman named Scota Bess, and indeed any historical record of her life, is seemingly lost to the shadow of her tale. I have written about her for paid subscribers of my Substack.

My obsession with the painter John Atkinson Grimshaw is rekindled by the mouldy prints of his work hanging in an abandoned croft on Stronsay. Shipwrecks, mermaid chairs, selkie songs and seal culls…The final instalment of my Stronsay field notes is free to read at my Substack. 

A Lapsed Christian Weighs in…

| Allyson Shaw

on the Church of Scotland Apology to those Accused of Witchcraft 

Photo by Alex Gorham on Unsplash

When I began writing about this history over four years ago, an apology from the church seemed an impossibility. Very few people were openly discussing this history, save academics and ghost hunters. The work for a pardon hadn’t yet begun, and the idea of a national monument had been discussed and abandoned several years earlier before being picked up again.

The Church intends to apologise, and this comes on the back of the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s historic apology to the accused on International Women’s Day this year. 

At the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly at the end of May, the elders voted unanimously in favour of a motion for a formal apology to those accused of witchcraft. The motion was put forward by Rev Prof Susan Hardman Moore in conjunction with a paper written by Professor Glen Pettigrove for the theological forum in response to a request from Remembering the Accused Witches of Scotland. The paper, “Apologising for Historic Wrongs,” begins by focusing on Jesus’ teachings of about anger and reconciliation and then summarises opposing arguments by putting forth a series of hypothetical objections that perhaps reflect the intellectual resistance those in favour of an apology have met—for instance, a historical, group apology does not accept personal responsibility for past wrongs but instead stands in solidarity with the victims. It argues that an apology could impose modern ideas on the history of the witch hunts, and witch hunters were doing their best despite their mistaken ideas. “Surely it is unfair to blame them for piety, patriotic loyalty, or benevolent concern for public welfare.” I would argue that many at the time did not see the actions of the church as pious or benevolent, and even when modern scepticism entered the dialogue in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, witch hunting continued in Scotland. 

The current church is not the same entity as the Church of Scotland in the 16th-18th centuries. It is product of schisms and mergers and is a different organisation than the historical Church that conducted witch hunts. Yet church services are conducted in buildings that still have jougs, or iron neck rings, attached, ‘witches rings’ used to chain the accused to the church wall or steeples where women were imprisoned while being interrogated. Scripture used to kill thousands is still part of the sacred text used in worship. In the eyes of many Scots, including myself, the contemporary church is tainted by the terrible injustices in its larger history, regardless of the specifics of the organisation. 

The paper goes on to present a persuasive argument about reconciliation and neighbourliness.

For many within our community, when [our neighbours] think of the church they think of an organisation with a history of bad behaviour: they think of racism, sexism, homophobia, greed, hypocrisy, inquisitions, witch-hunts, crusades, religious bigotry, sectarianism, social exclusion, child abuse cover-ups, complicity with imperialism, siding with the powerful against the vulnerable, and the like. They think of our worst qualities at our worst moments. And given how bad we have been at those moments – and how imperfect we remain even at our best – they quite reasonably have something against us.

Professor Glen Pettigrove , Theological Forum. “Apologising for Historic Wrongs”

The paper concludes, “it is possible to stand in solidarity with the victims and affirm current community standards even if we have not determined who all the bad actors were, what motivated them, and whether they should have known better.” The apology also becomes an invitation to self-scrutiny and vigilance—a commitment to making sure past wrongs are not repeated.

I will be curious to see what the final language of the apology will be and just how much clarity there is in it, yet the impulse is there and it’s a huge shift. It matters deeply to me. What does it mean to contemporary Scots or Christians alienated from the church? While I have entered into churches over the past twenty years to observe art, architecture or relics, I have not gone in to worship. Yet as a child and young woman I was a devout Christian. I read the Bible regularly and sought out the teachings of Jesus, wondering what was most authentic in the Bible. I read the Gospels of Thomas and Mary Magdalen and began to question the assumptions Christians made about the “word of God.” My early poems—where my life began as a professional writer— were part of this interrogation. I attended a church in California that had many queer people like myself in it. I would sit during the service and weep. Back then, I thought perhaps they were holy tears, and now I wonder if it was ancestral trauma, a deep understanding that historically these Christian words and ideas had been used to kill thousands.

What was I doing there? The more I found out about the church’s history, the less I felt I could embrace any Christian teachings. I left, but I kept looking back. Why can’t you make this right, I wondered whenever I would pass a particularly quaint little chapel or a TRY PRAYING billboard. 

As I researched and travelled around Scotland while writing Ashes and Stones: a Scottish journey in search of witches and witness, I was amazed at the role the church played in this machine of mass death. But what I also found were voices and acts of resistance to this policy of women-killing. In the 16th-18th centuries, this belief in satanic bargains and women’s moral weakness was not ubiquitous even within the church. It’s important to acknowledge that the witch hunts were not just a product of an unenlightened past but of a horrifying abuse of power, a cynical consolidation of patriarchal beliefs and a stamping out of a certain animistic spirituality that resisted church control. Yet there were many who subverted this in their own ways.

This solidarity with the accused continues into the present with Scottish people maintaining, updating and creating memorials—sometimes in private, under cover of darkness or without any institutional support. These stories are part of the book I have just finished writing.

The imminent apology has left me to wonder if I would ever enter a church again to pray and worship. Would I be welcome and what or who would receive my prayers? 

Ashes and Stones to be published by Sceptre in January 2023

| Allyson Shaw
Excerpt from Nicola Sturgeon’s speech on International Women’s Day

I longed for an authentic glimpse of the women executed for witchcraft hundreds of years ago, and I went out into the landscape to meet them. Their voices and lives became braided with my own in moving and unexpected ways. I’m excited that Sceptre will bring this humanising perspective on the accused to a wider audience.’

–Allyson Shaw

The day after Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology for those accused of witchcraft in Scotland, Sceptre has publicised the press release for my book on the same topic. It is wonderful timing. Sturgeon’s apology is healing not only the past but present and future misogyny. I am moved to tears and so proud to be Scottish right now.

From the Ashes and Stones trade announcement:

 Ashes and Stones is a moving and personal journey, along rugged coasts and through remote villages and modern cities, in search of the traces of those accused of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Scotland. We visit modern memorials, roadside shrines and standing stones and roam among forests and hedge mazes, folk lore and political fantasies. From fairy hills to forgotten caves, we explore a spellbound landscape.

Allyson Shaw untangles the myth of witchcraft and gives voice to those erased by it. Her elegant and lucid prose weaves threads of history and feminist reclamation, alongside beautiful travel, nature and memoir writing, to create a vibrant memorial. This is the untold story of the witches’ monuments of Scotland and the women’s lives they mark. Ashes and Stones is a trove of folklore linking the lives of modern women to the horrors of the past, and it is record of resilience and a call to choose and remember our ancestors. 

Charlotte Humphery, Senior Commissioning Editor at Sceptre, who is working with Francine Toon’s authors while Toon is on parental leave, says: ‘Ashes and Stones is a beautiful exploration of a dark history that is often forgotten or trivialised. Thousands of women were murdered by state forces during the witch hunts and Allyson Shaw revives some of these women – through historical records, physical presence and informed imagination – with tenderness and compassion. In this book, she has created her own memorial that is rich with magic of folk lore and the power of the Scottish landscape and resonant with the politics of today. We are delighted to be publishing this brilliant and important book.’

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