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Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca

Liber XXXV · Witchcraft & Wicca · Chapter VIII: Witch Trials

Janet Horne: The Last Witch Executed in Scotland (1727)

Janet Horne and the Dornoch witch burning of 1727: what the sources say, the end of the Scottish witch-hunt, and the modern apology and memorials.

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Janet Horne is the name tradition gives to the woman burned for witchcraft at Dornoch in Sutherland, usually dated to 1727 — the last person executed for witchcraft in Scotland and, by most reckonings, in Britain. She was accused of turning her daughter into a pony and having her shod by the Devil, and she was put to death on the authority of a local sheriff-depute at a time when educated opinion had largely turned against witch trials. Almost everything about her rests on later report, but her case has become the symbol of the end of the Scottish witch-hunt.

The Dornoch Case: What the Sources Say§

The story of the Dornoch burning is known chiefly from writers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rather than from trial papers. The fullest early account is usually traced to the Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, written by an English official, Edmund Burt, during his service in the Highlands in the 1720s and 1730s and published in 1754. Sir Walter Scott retold the case in his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), and later local historians added details from tradition.

According to these accounts, an elderly woman living near Dornoch was accused together with her daughter. The daughter is said to have had a deformity of the hands and feet, and neighbours explained it by claiming that the mother had transformed her into a pony, ridden her to witches' meetings and had her shod by the Devil — the lameness being the mark of the horseshoes. The sheriff-depute of Sutherland, Captain David Ross of Littledean, heard the case, and the mother was condemned. The daughter is reported to have escaped. Burt adds that the daughter later had a son with the same affliction, a detail he seems to have offered as proof of an inherited condition rather than of witchcraft.

The execution itself is remembered in a single, much-repeated image. The old woman, brought out on a cold day to be burned — tradition says in a barrel of tar — is said to have warmed her hands at the fire prepared for her, apparently not understanding what was happening. Scott used this detail to suggest that she was confused or senile. Whether or not it is literally true, it captures the helplessness of the accused and the shame later generations felt about the event.

The problem of names and dates§

No record of a formal trial survives, and historians note that the proceedings may have been irregular. By the early eighteenth century a witchcraft prosecution in Scotland normally required a commission from central authority, and executions on a local sheriff's warrant alone would have been doubtful in law. The date is disputed: 1727 is the year given in most modern works, but a memorial stone in the Littletown area of Dornoch bears the date 1722, the year Scott also used. The name is uncertain too. "Janet Horne" (or "Jenny Horne") seems to have been a stock name for a witch in parts of Scotland, and it is possible that tradition attached it to a woman whose real name is lost.

Scotland's Witch-Hunt from 1563 to the Eighteenth Century§

The Dornoch case came at the very end of a long and severe persecution. In 1563 the Scottish Parliament, under Mary Queen of Scots, made witchcraft and the consulting of witches capital crimes. Prosecutions were sporadic at first, but in 1590–91 the North Berwick trials, in which King James VI took a personal interest, linked witchcraft to a supposed plot against the king's life and his bride's voyage from Denmark. James went on to write Daemonologie (1597), partly in answer to the English sceptic described in Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft.

Scotland then experienced several national panics, the largest in 1597, 1628–30, 1649–50 and 1661–62. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, a database compiled at the University of Edinburgh, records nearly 4,000 people accused between 1563 and 1736, the great majority women. How many were executed is less certain because the outcome of many cases is unknown; estimates commonly run from around 1,500 to more than 2,000. Those condemned were usually strangled at the stake and their bodies burned — being burned alive, as tradition holds of the Dornoch woman, was exceptional.

Why Scotland was so severe§

Historians such as Christina Larner, Julian Goodare and Brian Levack have explained the intensity of Scottish prosecutions by several factors: a Reformed church committed to building a godly society, kirk sessions that monitored local morals and gathered accusations, the use of local commissions that allowed trials far from the central courts, and the acceptance of the demonic pact, including the Devil's mark, as the core of the crime. Torture was in principle restricted, but sleep deprivation and "witch-pricking" in search of the mark were widely used. For the wider European context see The European Witch Trials.

The Decline of Prosecution Before Dornoch§

By 1700 the tide was turning. Senior judges grew more cautious about evidence, and most accusations ended in acquittal or were never brought to trial. There were still flare-ups. At Paisley in 1697, after the illness of a girl named Christian Shaw, a group of people was convicted of witchcraft and several were executed. In 1704–05 at Pittenweem in Fife, accusations led to the death of Janet Cornfoot, killed by a mob after she had been released, an event that shocked many contemporaries. In 1709 a woman named Elspeth Rule was tried at Dumfries and banished rather than executed.

Against this background the Dornoch burning looked to many observers like a relic — a local official acting on beliefs that the courts in Edinburgh had largely ceased to apply. Popular fear of witches, however, had not disappeared. Belief in charms, the evil eye, cunning folk and familiar spirits persisted in Scottish communities well into the nineteenth century, even after the law ceased to recognise witchcraft as a real crime.

The End of the Law: The Witchcraft Act of 1735§

In 1736 the Parliament of Great Britain passed the Witchcraft Act, usually dated 1735 by the old-style calendar. It repealed both the English statute of 1604 and the Scottish Act of 1563, and it made it impossible to prosecute anyone for witchcraft, sorcery or conjuration as real crimes. Instead it penalised people who pretended to have such powers or who claimed to tell fortunes or find lost goods by occult means. The measure was opposed by some in Scotland, notably the judge and politician James Erskine, Lord Grange, but it passed easily. Its later history, including its use against Spiritualist mediums in the twentieth century, is told in The Witchcraft Act of 1735.

The Dornoch woman was therefore among the very last to suffer under a law that was about to vanish. That timing is part of why her case attracted later attention: it seemed to measure how far, and how unevenly, the Enlightenment had reached into the Highlands.

Memory, Memorials and the 2022 Apology§

The Dornoch stone, a rough block marking the traditional site of the burning, has long been visited by those curious about the town's past, and the case appears in guidebooks and local histories. In the twenty-first century interest broadened into a campaign. The Witches of Scotland campaign, launched in 2020, asked for a legal pardon, an apology and a national memorial for all those convicted under the 1563 Act.

On 8 March 2022, International Women's Day, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon made a formal apology in the Scottish Parliament to those accused, convicted and executed for witchcraft, describing their treatment as an injustice rooted in misogyny. The Church of Scotland's General Assembly also voted in 2023 to acknowledge and apologise for the church's role in the persecutions. Proposals for a statutory pardon have been discussed in the Scottish Parliament. In this way a single, poorly documented execution in a small Highland town has come to stand for thousands of people whose names survive only in court registers, or not at all.

Historians caution that commemoration can simplify. The accused were not, as is sometimes said, mainly healers or practitioners of a surviving pagan religion — a theory associated with the Murray thesis and now rejected. They were overwhelmingly ordinary people caught up in neighbourhood quarrels, church discipline and the theology of the demonic pact. Remembering them accurately is part of what the modern memorial movement seeks to achieve.

Frequently asked questions§

Who was the last person executed for witchcraft in Scotland?§

The last execution is usually identified as that of the woman known as Janet Horne, burned at Dornoch in Sutherland. Most modern accounts give the date as 1727, although a local stone says 1722 and the original records are lost.

Why was Janet Horne accused of witchcraft?§

According to later accounts, neighbours claimed she had turned her daughter, who had malformed hands and feet, into a pony, ridden her and had her shod by the Devil. The daughter's disability was taken as the visible proof of the charge.

How many people were executed for witchcraft in Scotland?§

About 3,800 to 4,000 people are known to have been accused between 1563 and 1736. Because many outcomes are unrecorded, historians' estimates of executions vary, commonly from around 1,500 to more than 2,000.

Has Scotland apologised for the witch trials?§

Yes. In March 2022 the First Minister issued a formal state apology to those accused and executed under the Witchcraft Act of 1563, and the Church of Scotland followed with its own apology in 2023.

Sources and further reading§