Haunted By History

Across the Fife coast, whispers of the witch hunts still haunt the towns where the fates of innocent women were sealed by fear and superstition

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SOME of her body is likely still to be under the stone, in the thick mud with the lugworms where the Firth of Forth covers it twice a day.

Much of it, including the skull, was removed in the 1800s as a gift, because a local wealthy man wanted a witch's skull for his collection. The skull is currently missing.

Lilias Adie was accused of witchcraft in the small Fife village of Torryburn in 1704. She was imprisoned and interrogated repeatedly, and she was forced to confess in front of the entire congregation on a Sunday. Then she died in jail.

I parked up at the playground car park on Torryburn waterfront. The tide was way, way out, exposing a quarter of a mile of grey silt between the sand and the sea.

Curlews and oystercatchers were working their patches. A granny and grandad walked their young granddaughter from the car park to the playpark.

I overhead the granny say to the girl: "She was one of the women killed as witches."

"But witches aren't real?"

"It was no much more than a hunner years ago that the last witch of Scotland was executed." The grandad, walking a few steps behind and smoking a cigarette, may or may not have been listening.

Lilias was buried at some expense in a “Revenant” burial – apparently the only one in Scotland. Her body was placed inside a wooden box and a deep hole was dug in the foreshore.

Once buried, a sandstone slab was brought from a quarry and lumped on top of the grave to stop Lilias’s body from being reanimated by the devil, who might use her corpse as a tool to terrorise the communities of Torryburn, Newmills or Culross.