Janet Horne — the name is partly a convention, 'Jenny Horne' being a generic Highland nickname for a witch — was an elderly woman of Dornoch in Sutherland, by all accounts senile, whose daughter had a deformity of the hands and feet. Her neighbours seized on this, accusing the old woman of having used her daughter as a pony to ride to the Devil, who had shod the girl for the journey.
The story
The local sheriff-depute condemned her, and in 1727 Janet Horne was stripped, smeared with tar, paraded through the town in a barrel and burned. Tradition holds that, bewildered to the end, she warmed her hands at the very fire being readied to kill her. Her death is remembered as the last legal execution for witchcraft in the British Isles; the Witchcraft Act was repealed nine years later. A stone in the Littletown district of Dornoch, the Witch's Stone, is said to mark the spot, though even the date is disputed between 1722 and 1727 — a measure of how poorly the killing of a confused old woman was recorded.