Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t locate a map of the Fife Witches Trail, so we set off without one, trusting local knowledge to keep us right. All we had were the names of three villages whose infamy lies in their history of killing women accused of witchcraft during Scotland’s dark times. Torryburn, Valleyfield, Culross. If we were expecting the haunted guilt of a Salem-type community, what we got was three picturesque coastal towns peopled by the friendliest of folk.
The Torryburn carpark had information boards, but no mention of the Witches Trail. We wandered through the village asking people along the way. No one seemed to be quite sure what we meant. Not a shifty denial of the village’s dark past, but a genuine look of bemusement when we mentioned a plaque. A kind cyclist went out of her way to get directions and told us to look near the bridge. Another directed us along a woodland path in the opposite direction, towards the Witch's Tower. Like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story where you keep a finger in the book to return to the other option, we picked both.
The trail through the woods became progressively eerier until we found ourselves surrounded by hundreds-of-years-old yew trees bent into wonderfully weird shapes. One looked like draped limbs, crossing its legs and leaning in for a blether. Another was apparently weeping blood; the coagulated red sap and the cleft in the trunk it flowed from looked like a menstruating vulva.
The victims of the Scottish witch trials of the 17-18th centuries were ordinary folk; wifies who knew herbal remedies, brewers, powerless servant girls, widows who owned land, pious women (and men) shocked to be named by others under torture. It’s unlikely any of them considered themselves a witch. Had there been actual witches though, this yew grove felt like a mystical space they’d have met in. Next to it, the Witch’s Tower, a large private house built over the remains of a 17th century one, was a letdown.
As we headed back along the coastal path, what we thought was the Witch's Rock, where women accused of witchcraft were tried by drowning, was visible out in the bay. Seeming to be accessible at low tide, we risked wading out across the outwardly firm mudflats, using seaweed as handholds. We abandoned our foolishness when the mud tried to steal our boots and locals on the coastal path stopped to look out at us with concern. The tide can come in rapidly on this small bay on the Firth of Forth. Anyway, as we discovered later, it was the wrong rock.
Back on shore, we met a more knowledgeable local couple and discovered that the nameless bust on a plinth near the car park is Lilias Adie, the only “witch” to have a known grave. Accused of fornicating with the devil, Lilias refused to name others under torture and died before she could be executed. With luck the couple could point out her intertidal grave, only accessible at low tide, which was still in our favour. A solid, thick, maybe metre-long sandstone slab with no obvious markings was placed over her grave to prevent the devil from reanimating her. The "hulking half-ton" slab didn’t protect her from grave robbers though and poor Lilias’s remains were divvied out among universities and antiquarian collectors.
From the beach, we scrambled over the low wall to the roadside beside the railway bridge and found the plaque remembering Lilias, lying on the verge in line with her grave slab. Finding the beautiful bronze disc in the grass was like stumbling upon treasure. It’s illustrated with Adie's face and a surround of plants, Torryburn buildings, a crescent moon and a prancing devil. "They feared she would rise from the dead", it reads. "How could she as she was an ordinary woman". We spent a few moments contemplating Lilias's life and unjust fate, the disc a portal to a past that felt strangely less distant.
Its location is not at all obvious and less determined adventurers may not have found it. The Valleyfield plaque proved even more elusive. We stopped dozens of people as we trudged along the coastal path in the rain, the May afternoon having turned suddenly dark. They were unfailingly friendly and wanted to be helpful. Some knew of the Torryburn and Culross ones but none that their local plaque sits under the information boards at the entrance to Valleyfield Woods, as we discovered driving back up the road later. This one also remembers Adie, "an innocent victim of unenlightened times." As we lingered, a bus pulled up and deposited a walking group, who congregated near the boards. We willed them to look down and notice the plaque. Nobody did.
There's no missing the Culross one. It's under the information board by the bus stop facing the Town Hall. One of writer Sara Sheridan’s Witches Unite stickers marks the spot. The heritage village of Culross’s cobbled streets, tiny houses and terracotta-coloured palace with a wee cafe tucked in behind it mask its bloody history. With a population of about 600 people in the 1600s, this small community murdered 32 of its women. "So many ordinary women", reads the plaque.
The lives of the women, the brutal times they lived in and their restless ghosts were brought vividly to life for us by Linda from National Trust Scotland. She pointed out the tiny top floor windows of the Town House where the accused were imprisoned and tortured. They apparently still make their presence felt with otherworldly noises and unexplained incidents. They’re not at peace and we don't blame them for still raging at the injustices and indignities they suffered. On International Women's Day 2022, then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a state apology for the witch trials, followed later by an apology from the Church of Scotland. Work is ongoing to issue a legal pardon of the victims of this massive-scale miscarriage of justice. Maybe then they'll rest. Maybe.