On a quiet road outside Dunning in Perthshire stands one of Scotland's strangest monuments: a rough cairn some twenty feet high, crowned by a cross, on which is painted in white letters 'Maggie Wall burnt here 1657 as a witch'. Visitors leave coins, feathers, flowers and candles at its foot, and the inscription is repainted by unknown hands to keep it legible.
The story
The mystery is that no Maggie Wall appears in any record. The exhaustive Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, which lists every documented trial between 1563 and 1736, contains no such woman, and the monument itself seems to date only from the late eighteenth century. Whether she existed, or whether the cairn commemorates some half-remembered local victim under an invented name, has never been resolved. In its very anonymity the monument has become something larger — a memorial to the thousands of mostly poor women accused and killed in Scotland's witch-hunts, a named stone standing in for all the nameless.