Isobel Gowdie was a young farmer's wife living near Auldearn, close to Nairn, when in the spring of 1662 she made a series of four remarkable confessions to witchcraft over six weeks. What sets her case apart is that the testimony appears to have been given freely, without the violent torture usual to such trials, and that it is soaked in the imagery of older Highland fairy belief rather than the imported demonology of the courts.
The story
Gowdie described slipping out of her own body to fly through the night air, feasting with the fairy folk beneath the hills, and riding with the Queen of Elfhame. She chanted rhymes that turned straws and beanstalks into horses, that let her vanish from sight, and that transformed her into a hare, a cat or a crow and back again — echoes of the Highland *fith-fath*, the charm of shape-changing. Her coven, she said, met to work their magic and to trouble their neighbours' crops and cattle.
It is uncertain whether Gowdie was executed in the usual way or simply allowed to slip back into obscurity, for the records fall silent after her confessions. What survives is one of the most vivid windows ever opened onto the folk belief of seventeenth-century Scotland, where witchcraft, fairy lore and the charms of the cunning folk were tangled inseparably together.