Marie Lamont was a young woman of about eighteen from Inverkip in Renfrewshire, on the Firth of Clyde, whose confession in 1662 is one of the richest and strangest in the records of Scottish witchcraft. Like Isobel Gowdie's in the same year, her testimony seems to have been given with a startling, vivid fluency, drawing as much on older fairy belief as on the demonology of her accusers.
The story
She told of being taken by a neighbour to meet the Devil, of renouncing her baptism and being given a new name, of meeting by night to dance and feast, and of transforming into a cat with her companions to creep into houses and work mischief. She spoke too of the fairy folk and of charms for healing and harming cattle. Inverkip had a particular reputation as a haunt of witches, and Marie Lamont's account — half confession, half folk-tale — survives as a remarkable window onto the imaginative world of a Clyde-side girl caught up in the witch-fear of the seventeenth century; like most so accused, she is believed to have been executed.