Scotland reckons with the violent witch hunts of its past
Today in Focus
The Guardian
4.6 • 5.9K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2022
⏱️ 28 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Guardian. |
| 0:09.2 | Today, they were accused of witchcraft, but they were just ordinary women. |
| 0:14.8 | Will Scotland pardon them? |
| 0:30.1 | There's only one known grave of a condemned witch in Scotland. It belongs to Lillius A.D. |
| 0:35.6 | Lillius A.D. was a woman who lived in a small village in 5 Col. Toriburn and she was accused of witchcraft in 1704. |
| 0:47.6 | And Lillius, who thinks quite an old lady, her sight's failing, she's maybe not as healthy as she might have been, we think Lillius is widowed. |
| 0:56.6 | She was accused by some other women locally of being witch. She was taken in, she was questioned over several days. |
| 1:04.6 | After being interrogated and tortured, Lillius confessed. |
| 1:10.6 | A record showed that when asked to name other women, she refused. |
| 1:14.6 | So when people were saying, you were at a witch's meeting, who else did you see there? She either says, you know, that was a long time ago, they're all dead or they were masked. |
| 1:24.6 | So there are names I think that she has to give them because they've got their teeth into those names. But when they really fish with her, she stows them. |
| 1:32.6 | That indicates a sort of fair amount of savvy and also, yeah, compassion, that she didn't want to have anybody else have to deal with what she was going through. |
| 1:44.6 | Lillius died in prison before being found guilty, but because she confessed to being a witch, she was denied a church burial. |
| 1:52.6 | They had this idea that they could come back to life through the devil, essentially, and that if you didn't get rid of the body, you were leaving yourself open to the devil coming back and wreaking havoc. |
| 2:02.6 | They take her to the borough by underies, and they bury her between the low tide mark and the high tide mark, and they put a great stone over her grave. |
| 2:13.6 | In 2014, historian and BBC presenter Louise Yomann went on a mission to find Lillius' grave. |
| 2:24.6 | Off I go, squelching into the mud thinking, I don't know what I'm doing, oh boy, I don't know what I'm doing. |
| 2:32.6 | And then suddenly I saw in this group of stones, that stone is rectangular, doesn't look like any other beach stone, and it was covered in seaweed. |
| 2:44.6 | With renewed interest in Lillius' tragic story, forensic artists at the University of Dundee reconstructed Lillius' face. |
| 2:52.6 | So we went to Dr Christopher Ren at Dundee, and Christopher brought back her face. |
| 2:58.6 | I said to Christopher, accused which is where ordinary people. And I said, could you just do her as a modern, normal, old, faith-ladied, and you know, he did. |
| 3:09.6 | I think he gave her a wee pair of them, and you know, you could just imagine her sitting next to you on the bus, maybe with a wee dog. |
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