Threads of Memory: Witches of Scotland
There are some histories that refuse to stay in the past.
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a book signing with Claire Mitchell KC and Zoe Venditozzi, the women behind Witches of Scotland, a campaign seeking justice for the thousands of people accused of witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736. Their work has long interested me, not only because of my own fascination with folklore and women’s history, but because it asks a question that sits at the heart of so much of my own work: What do we owe the people whose stories were distorted, silenced, or forgotten?
Mitchell and Venditozzi founded Witches of Scotland in
2020 with three goals: a legal pardon for those convicted under Scotland’s witchcraft laws, a formal apology from the Scottish government, and a national memorial to those who were persecuted. In 2022, then-First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology. The work toward pardon and memorial continues.
Their book, How to Kill a Witch, looks beyond our modern image of “the witch” to examine what actually happened to people accused of witchcraft and the machinery that made their persecution possible. Drawing on trial records, witness accounts, historical documents, and the work of other scholars, Mitchell and Venditozzi trace the process from accusation through interrogation, torture, confession, and execution. It is history, but it is also an examination of power: who possessed it, who did not, and what could happen when fear and authority were turned against the vulnerable. However, one of the things that has stayed with me most is something that isn't contained between the covers of the book at all.
It is woven in wool.
The Witches of Scotland tartan was created as a living memorial to those accused during the Scottish witch trials, and there is meaning embedded quite literally in its threads. Black and grey recall the darkness of the period and the ashes of those who were persecuted. Pink and red represent the legal tape that helped seal the fate of the accused. Three white threads represent the campaign's three aims: pardon, apology, memorial. Then, there are 173 black threads to represent the 173 years from 1563 through 1736 during which Scotland's Witchcraft Act was in force.
I love the idea of memory made tangible this way.
As a genealogist, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the ways we remember people. We search for names in registers and wills, trace relationships through DNA, preserve photographs whose subjects are slowly becoming strangers, and tell family stories in the hope that someone will tell them again after we're gone. Sometimes all that remains of a life is a name scratched into a record and the knowledge that this person once stood where we stand now.
The people accused of witchcraft left records, too, but often they are records created by the very systems that persecuted them. Their names survive because someone accused them, interrogated them, imprisoned them, tried them, or recorded their deaths. There is something profoundly moving, then, about taking those histories out of legal documents and putting them into cloth.
Thread crosses thread. Individual strands become something larger. The pattern exists because they intersect.
Perhaps that is why the tartan speaks to me so strongly. So much of my own work lives in those intersections: genealogy and folklore, history and spirituality, evidence and story, the lives we can document and the lives we can only glimpse between the lines. It is also, quite wonderfully, what warp and weft mean.
The warp is the set of threads held in place. The weft moves through them, over and under, back and forth, until separate strands become cloth. History works much the same way. There are the facts we can anchor, and there are the stories, memories, interpretations, and questions we weave through them. If we're careful, something begins to take shape.
The Witches of Scotland tartan does more than commemorate a terrible chapter of history. It asks us to remember actual human beings beneath a word that eventually became folklore.
Not witches. Women. People.
Perhaps remembrance begins there.
