Allison Balfour

In 1594, Allison Balfour of Stenness was caught up in a political conspiracy: associates of Patrick Stewart, the powerful 2nd Earl of Orkney, accused her of agreeing to use witchcraft against him on their behalf. To extract a confession, the authorities subjected her to forty-eight hours of torture in the caschielawis, a leg-crushing iron frame, while — in a horrifying display of collective punishment — her elderly husband was placed in the 'lang irons', her son was tortured in the boots, and her seven-year-old daughter had her fingers crushed in pilliwinks (thumbscrews) before her eyes.

Broken by the ordeal, Balfour confessed. But on the scaffold, before her execution by strangulation and burning on 16 December 1594, she publicly retracted everything, declaring the confession false and extracted only by torture.

Her case is one of the earliest and most thoroughly documented of Orkney's witch trials, cited repeatedly by historians such as Julian Goodare as a textbook example of how torture, politics, and the witch-hunting frenzy combined to destroy an entire family. The Orkney Heritage Society's witchcraft trial memorial in Kirkwall now commemorates her alongside Orkney's other victims.