Bessie Dunlop was a farmer's wife, midwife and healer from Lynn near Dalry in Ayrshire, brought to trial in 1576 for sorcery and witchcraft. Her defence — extraordinary in its detail — was that her gift for healing and for finding lost goods came not from the Devil but from a spirit named Tom Reid, an honest-looking old man in a grey coat and black bonnet who carried a white wand.
The story
Reid, she said, had been killed at the Battle of Pinkie Cleugh in 1547, and now moved between the living world and the 'Court of Elfame', the fairy realm. He acted as her intermediary with the *gude wichtis*, the good wights or fairies, bringing her the knowledge of herbs and charms by which she helped her neighbours. Her testimony is one of the clearest surviving accounts of how Scottish folk healing and fairy belief became fatally entangled with the legal idea of witchcraft.
Reported by a neighbour, Dunlop was taken to Edinburgh, and despite a defence rooted entirely in the older fairy faith she was found guilty, strangled and burned on Castle Hill. In 2022 her home community of Dalry gathered to remember her among the many ordinary women caught up in Scotland's witch trials.