The Bute Witches

During the Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1661-62, six women from the parish of Rothesay on the Isle of Bute were interrogated for witchcraft. Historians identify four of them — Margaret McLevin, Margaret McWilliam, Janet Morrison and Isobell McNicoll — as having been executed in 1662, with a fifth possibly dying in custody before sentence could be carried out.

Margaret McWilliam was the most notorious of the group: she had been regarded by her neighbours as a witch for more than thirty years before the trial. Her reputation was entangled with an earlier Bute tragedy — in 1630, a group of women starved to death while imprisoned in Rothesay Castle, and before dying they accused McWilliam of being a fairy herself, claiming she 'soon brought home a little fairy of her own to nurse.'

The Bute case is unusually well documented for an island trial of this period and illustrates how, in the Scottish islands, accusations of witchcraft were frequently inseparable from older beliefs about fairies, changelings and the 'good neighbours' — the accused were as likely to be feared as intermediaries with the fairy world as they were as servants of the Devil.