The 19th century folklore about Monzie, however is another thing. It’s deeply confused - claiming she was a real person executed in 1715, but there were no executions in that area in 1715. The same family folklore that gave the 1715 date, gave the laird of Inchbraikie as ‘Black Pate’ who was active in the Montrose wars of the mid 17th century (d.1687) - so he’d have had to have risen from his grave to be involved. The story of the curse and the stone only surfaces in the mid 19th century, where I saw it in the family papers, by which time the influence of Sir Walter Scott and his ‘Letters on Demonology’ had made having such stories in the family very trendy. The blue stone could well have been a charm stone or healing stone, as were once common in Highland families, which simply had the fictional story attached to it - but that doesn’t make Kate any more real. You cant execute a mythical character.

Now you could take Kate as being emblematic, as a mythical character standing for all the real women who were executed but the fictional scenario being outlined above is very misleading and not at all what the witch hunt in Scotland was about. Where you do get healing mentioned in witch trials, it’s usually because the accusation is being made that someone used their healing powers for evil : eg. that they magically charmed a disease off X and gave to Y who is making the accusation. When people are accused solely of using dodgy charms that the church isn’t too happy with, the normal stipulation is that if they’re punished for their ’superstitious practices’ and that it not extend to ‘life or limb’. You don’t get burned as a witch for rubbing thyme on someone’s leg, you wouldn’t even get penance as a charmer, because you haven’t said a charm or used anything ’superstitious’ ( herbs don’t count as superstitious because they had known medicinal ‘virtues’ in the early modern pharmacy)

If you were going to write a fictional scenario about this, it would involve popping down to your friendly herbalist’s shop to find out if they know any good rituals which would take the disease off you and give it to the next person who came along. But healing is actually not a common or normal motif in the Scottish witch trials at all, despite it popping up in the high profile Agnes Sampson case.

From the Survey of Scottish witchcraft FAQ:

“Q. Were the witches midwives or healers?
A. Not usually. We have recorded 9 individuals whose occupation was recorded as being a midwife, and for 10 people midwifery practices were included as part of the accusations of witchcraft levelled against them. This is a tiny percentage of the overall total. Folk healing was more common and featured in the witchcraft accusations of 141 people—about 4%. Even so, it was not something that the typical witch seems to have engaged in—though the beliefs that underpinned folk healing were closely related to witchcraft beliefs. If magic could be used to heal, it could also be used to harm.”

I’m a huge fan of this blog which I read on my RSS feed,so congratulations in your recent anniversary, but please can we have more real Scottish witches, not fictional ones?