On Saturday 22 October 2022, at 11am, a short ceremony will take place on Tweed Green in Peebles. It marks the culmination of a year-long campaign by myself and my co-campaigner, Elisa Smith, to commemorate the people of Peeblesshire who were accused of, and executed for, witchcraft in the 16th-18th centuries.

In this entry we'll explore two things: firstly, the history of the witch trials in Peeblesshire, and secondly, our successful campaign for a memorial.

A variation of this entry first appeared in the Peeblesshire News on Friday 14 October 2022.

A history of the witchcraft trials in Peeblesshire

Our research suggests that well over 100 people – mostly women, but many men as well – were accused of witchcraft across Peeblesshire in the 1600s. It is important to understand why this happened.

The 16th and 17th centuries were times of major strife in Scotland. Plague, famine, and war stalked the country, and times were very hard for ordinary people. In the Borders, stuck between John Knox’s Presbyterian Edinburgh and Catholic Northumberland over the Border to the south, a distinct identity sprang up in this threatened, wary Borders region. People believed and practised a blend of the "new religion" (Protestantism), the “old religion” (Catholicism), and folklore – a form of pre-Christian Celtic polytheism. Fairies, witches, and the devil himself were all believed by many to inhabit the hills and glens of the Tweed Valley. People were suspicious of outsiders and of one another.

King James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, reigned from 1567 until 1625. Following journeys undertaken by him and his new wife, Anne of Denmark, across the North Sea, where their ships were battered by storms, he became convinced that witches had conjured the storms in an attempt to kill him. This interest in witches grew into an obsession for James, an otherwise intellectual and articulate man, and he laid the groundwork for decades of intense witch hunts and brutal executions. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, he personally wrote Daemonologie in 1597: a pamphlet on witches, warlocks and the devil, which he seems to have intended to be used as a guidebook by the authorities to help them identify, try, and punish so-called witches wherever they were found in Scotland.

Peebles in 1629 would have been very different to the Peebles of today, though in some respects familiar. The High Street, running along an elevated peninsula of land between the Tweed and the Cuddy, was still the main thoroughfare and the Burgh Wall, still evident in the East Gate car park, would have marked the boundaries of the Royal Burgh. Somewhere to the East of the town, outside the town boundaries, was to be the site of brutal executions. The location of the burnings, back then called Calf Knowe, is now perhaps lost to time, and we have not yet been able to identify it with any certainty. There is some evidence to suggest a handful of possible locations including a part of Venlaw Hill around the Hydro Hotel, or the small knowe that now backs onto Witchwood Crescent (a name given much later) and Gallowhill. Others believe it could have been closer to Venlaw Castle, and some say it might have been closer to today's Eastgate car park. The truth is, we don't know where the burnings happened.

In one year in 1629, twenty seven people from Peebles, West Linton, Blyth Bridge, Romannobridge, Manor Valley, Stobo, Innerleithen, Traquair, and Kailzie were rounded up and thrown in the tolbooth jail in Peebles, now the site of the Bridgegate flats down by the Cuddy. I wrote about the events of 1629 in more detail in an earlier entry. In short, the victims were kept locked up for days, weeks, and months in awful conditions before their executions. They may have been healers, herbalists, or midwives in an age before conventional medicine existed; some healers may have described themselves as "witches" in this sense, before it became a bad word. Others may have been a little different in the way they dressed or looked. Or, all too often, they may have been perfectly ordinary in every way, but had fallen foul of their influential neighbours, who had made scurrilous accusations about them. All we can say with certainty is that they were not "witches" of the kind they were accused of being. They didn't meet the devil. They didn't cause crop failure. And they didn't make their neighbours ill. Therefore the basis of the prosecutions to come was unfounded, going by any intelligent analysis. The victims had no funeral or grave and their human remains would have been dumped into the River Tweed to ensure their evil was washed away.

The 1629 brutality was neither the first nor the last execution of innocent people accused of witchcraft in Peeblesshire. Another major local trial in 1649 saw more rounded up and killed, and plenty more were accused and executed throughout the century. But by the end of the 17th century, the existence of witches – something that was treated as a fact, and an existential threat, just a few years earlier – was now doubted by many, and the trials and executions rapidly declined. The last execution for witchcraft in the Borders happened in 1700. The Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563 was repealed in 1736, and although many in authority still believed in witchcraft, the burden of “proof” required at trial was elevated so high as to end the widespread executions for good. By that point, 352 witchcraft trials had taken place in the Borders, resulting in 221 executions.

The campaign to commemorate the victims

In the 21st century, we know that witches – as the prosecuting authorities understood the word in the 16th century – do not exist. We also know, whether we are atheists, agnostics or believers, that the devil is not a man wandering around the local hills and streets. Therefore, it is clear to us now that the local people executed for witchcraft were killed unjustly. Whatever their flaws, if indeed they had any, we can say with certainty that they simply did not commit the crimes they were accused of. We must therefore assume they were just guid Borders folk – not witches, which is a motif that will appear on the memorial stone. The 1629 trials in Peeblesshire were an extremely dark time in our town’s history, yet not many people know the story of the witch trials here.

Elisa and I wanted to change that. Having read Mary W. Craig’s book Borders Witch Hunt (2020), which I received as a lockdown birthday present, I began researching and blogging about the Peebles trials. Simultaneously, Elisa began undertaking her own extensive research, charting as far as possible the names of the victims and as many details as possible about their lives. We joined forces in early 2022 and agreed to channel our efforts into a tangible goal – securing a memorial for the local victims.

We wanted a memorial for two main reasons – firstly, to commemorate the witchcraft trial victims in Peeblesshire who never had a funeral or a grave marker. Secondly, as a reminder to people now and in the future of what can happen in hard times when people get jealous, petty, or spiteful with one another. The victims, the executioners, and the baying mob watching the victims burn were not strangers or people from far away. They are our own ancestors – you only need to read the surnames of the victims to see it. They lived here, walked many of the same roads and lanes as us, and recognised the hills that we know today. They farmed the same land as us. All that separates us from them is time. It is important we remember that as humans, and members of a community, we are capable of so much bad as well as so much good.

The stone will commemorate “all those in Peeblesshire persecuted under the 1563 Witchcraft Act”, including the twenty-seven executed in 1629 who will be named individually.

We were always conscious that it’s not just what we want that counts, but what the community wants. So, to find out if there was public support and what people thought, we undertook a public survey and engaged extensively with the public via the media, Peebles Community Council, our elected representatives at SBC and at Holyrood, and with other campaigners from around Scotland. We also consulted Mary Craig, the Borders-based historian and author of Borders Witch Hunt. Once we knew we had lots of local support, we went public with our plans, and that’s when Leslie and Emma from local William Purves Funeral Directors came forward with the generous offer of an engraved stone, which their business will maintain for the long term. We decided to site the memorial on Tweed Green because it is central, visible, and accessible, and because, as we have established, we cannot be sure where the execution site was, but we do know the remains of the victims probably ended up in the Tweed.

The six Tweeddale Councillors, who manage the Peebles Common Good Fund of which Tweed Green is an asset, unanimously backed our plans, as did Community Councillors. We have been delighted with the overwhelmingly positive support for this project. We’re especially grateful to the Peeblesshire News, which has reported on our project diligently since it began. Indeed, we've had lots of very welcome support from the media in covering the campaign - we've appeared in newspapers as well as in broadcast media.

We have never sought nor accepted public money for this project. We have always felt that would be wrong when so many in our community are struggling. Of the very few objections we received to the proposal for a memorial, most cited the misguided belief that this was a "waste of public money". Well, we can categorically allay that concern. The entire project has been voluntary, including our time and that of our supporters, and the memorial stone itself. At the unveiling ceremony, the speakers and musicians will be there voluntarily. For this, and to so many others, we are profoundly grateful.

The memorial stone will be positioned at the foot of a copper beech tree on Tweed Green, which stands alone on the grass between the cherry tree-lined path and the River Tweed. It will be visible, yet discreet and in keeping with its surroundings and hopefully there for a very long time as a visitor attraction and part of the town trail. In time we hope to “frame” it and the tree with a wall, or an encircling bench, but there will be a cost to that which we cannot yet afford, so it can be added at a later date.

The granite stone will be engraved with the following words:

In memory of all those in Peeblesshire persecuted under the 1563 Witchcraft Act, including these 27 executed in 1629

Janet Achesoun 

Katherine Alexander 

Helen Beatie 

Marion Boyd 

Katherine Broun 

Agnes Chalmers 

Marion Crosier 

Margaret Dicksoun 

Sussanna Elphinstoun 

John Graham 

Margaret Gowanlock 

Issobel Haddock 

Janet Hendersoun 

Gilbert Hog 

Margaret Johnestoun 

Marie Johnestoun 

Patrick Linton 

Katherine Mairschell 

William Mathesoun 

Agnes Robesoun 

Thomas Stoddart 

Agnes Thomesoun 

William Thomesoun 

Bessie Ur 

Jean Watsoun 

Katherine Wode 

Margaret Yerkine

guid Borders folk - not witches