Janet Forsyth, the Westray Storm Witch

Folk tradition on Westray remembers Janet Forsyth as a woman who warned her sweetheart, Ben Garrioch, not to go fishing on a day she had dreamed he would die. He went anyway and never returned, leaving Janet a recluse whose grief was said to have given her strange power over wind, fog and storm. Years later, when a sailing ship floundered off Westray in foul weather, Janet rowed out, took command, and guided the vessel safely to anchor in Pierowall Bay.

Days after this rescue, she was arrested, taken to Kirkwall, and tried for witchcraft. The surviving 1629 court record paints a far harsher picture than the legend: she was accused of slaughtering four pigs (causing illness in a woman who later ate the pork), of bewitching two men and then 'curing' them, of magically stripping the fat from neighbours' milk and the nourishment from their grain, and of cursing those who refused her alms. Found guilty on 11 November 1629, she was sentenced to be strangled and burned.

The folk legend later grafted on a happy ending — Garrioch, it was said, had merely been press-ganged and washed up on the Orkney mainland, returning just in time to spirit Janet away from the executioner to a quiet life in England. The gap between this romantic rescue story and the grim trial record makes Janet Forsyth one of the most poignant examples of how Orkney folk memory reshaped a real execution into legend.