Every article on this site runs into the same wall at some point. The English evidence is abundant and the Scottish evidence is thin. England has Historic England's public survey of ritual protection marks, six hundred responses in a single appeal. It has Northampton Museum's index of over three thousand concealed shoes. It has around two hundred catalogued witch bottles. Scotland has the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, which is superb, and then a great deal of silence. That silence is not an absence of practice. It is the shape of something that was done to the practice, and it has four main causes, none of them mysterious.

One: the Kirk

The Reformation in Scotland was thorough in a way the English one was not.

  • 1560. The Scottish Reformation. Within a generation the Kirk had established a system of local discipline through kirk sessions that reached into every parish and, in practice, into every household.
  • 1563. The Witchcraft Act. What followed is set out in its own article: roughly four thousand accused, around 2,500 executed, an execution rate around five times the European average.
  • 1581. An Act of Parliament made pilgrimage to holy wells illegal. Kirk session records are full of people being disciplined for things that are, from our side, folk practice. Going to a well. Keeping a fire on a particular night. Consulting a charmer. Saining a beast. The sessions were not primarily hunting witches; they were correcting neighbours, week after week, for centuries.

The effect on the record is specific and worth understanding. Practice did not stop. It stopped being mentioned. People kept doing it and stopped saying so, and what survives in the archive is not the practice but the prosecution of it. We know about the rowan charm because Margaret Barclay was tried with one in her possession.

Two: the Clearances

Between roughly 1750 and 1860, the population of large parts of the Highlands and Islands was removed from the land. The mechanism varied: eviction for sheep, then for deer forest, then for kelp, then simply because the land was worth more empty. The Strathnaver clearances in Sutherland from 1814, conducted under the factor Patrick Sellar, are the most notorious, but the pattern ran for over a century. Consider what a clearance does to a body of practice like the one this site describes.

  • It severs practice from place. Almost everything in Gaelic folk tradition is site-specific. This well. This ford. This hill. This shieling. A tradition of holy wells and boundary fords and a shrine at the head of a particular glen does not travel. Move the people and the practice does not move with them; it stops.
  • It destroys the buildings. Everything I have written about British household magick, the bottle under the threshold, the shoe in the chimney, the mark on the hearth beam, depends on the building surviving. Blackhouses were unroofed and burned. Whole townships went to grass. Whatever was in the walls went with them.
  • It breaks transmission. This material passed from older women to younger women in the same kitchen. Emigration to Canada and Australia, or to Glasgow, ends that in one generation.
  • It destroys the language. And with the language, the charms, which were metrical, memorised, and not translatable without loss.

Three: the collectors arrived at the end

Here is the awkward part, and it is why the sourcing on this site is so careful. Almost everything we have was collected between about 1860 and 1910. Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica was gathered from 1860. Campbell's collecting is late nineteenth century. The great Scottish folklore collections are all Victorian. Which means:

  • They were collecting after the damage. Carmichael's own introduction is explicit that he is recording things that are dying or already obsolete. He was not documenting a living tradition, he was salvaging a dispersing one.
  • They were working within a Romantic project. The Victorian interest in Celtic Scotland was bound up with a particular idea of a vanishing noble past, and that idea shaped what got written down, what got left out, and how it was phrased. Carmichael polished. Robertson's 1976 study found that hardly one of the published charms had escaped being touched up.
  • Their informants were the survivors. The people Carmichael spoke to in South Uist were, frequently, people whose families had been cleared, who had ended up on poor land, who had watched relatives leave for Cape Breton. He records some of this himself. The tradition he collected had already been through that.

So our best source is a Victorian literary reworking of a salvage operation conducted among displaced people at the end of the process. That is not a reason to discard it. It is a reason to say what it is every time you cite it.

Four: it was never written down in the first place

The simplest cause and the one most easily forgotten. Charms were oral, metrical and secret. Many were understood to lose their power if written, or if taught to more than one person, or if said aloud where others could learn them. Several collected charms come with the note that the reciter was breaking a rule by giving it. There is also a class dimension. This was the practice of people who were largely not literate, in a language that was not the language of record, in households that produced no documents. The absence of a paper trail is not evidence of absence. It is evidence of who was doing it.

What this means for practice

  • Expect gaps, and do not fill them. When the Scottish record runs out, the temptation is to borrow from Ireland, from Wales, from England, or from a modern book, and to present the join as seamless. Resist it. A tradition with an honest hole in it is worth more than a complete one made of putty.
  • Weight the material evidence. Where the written record is thin, the objects are not. The archaeology of concealed deposits, the surviving charms, the place-names, and the sites themselves are all real evidence, and place-names in particular are enormously under-used.
  • Understand why you may not find the Scottish version. The absence of Scottish ritual protection marks in the record almost certainly reflects building type, the Clearances, and the lack of a public appeal, rather than an absence of the practice.
  • Use the archives that exist. Kirk session records are held by National Records of Scotland and are extraordinary reading. Tobar an Dualchais holds thousands of Gaelic and Scots field recordings, free, searchable, and mostly ignored. Canmore records sites. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft is free.
  • And know that this is why the Gaelic matters. Not as decoration. The charms are metrical in Gaelic and the metre carries the memory. English translations are records of charms; the Gaelic is the charm.

The thing underneath

A great deal of modern Scottish esoteric material is reconstruction, invention or import wearing a kilt, and I understand entirely why. It is very hard to build a practice on an archive with this much missing from it.

But I would rather work with something honest and incomplete than something whole and false, and I would rather know why the hole is there.

The hole is there because of the Kirk, the Clearances, the timing of the collectors, and because it was never ours to write down.

That is a history worth knowing on its own account, quite apart from what it does for your practice.

Sources

  • The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, 1563–1736 — University of Edinburgh.
  • Larner, C. (1981). Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland. Chatto & Windus. On the Kirk session discipline system and its reach.
  • Todd, M. (2002). The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. Yale University Press. The best account of what kirk session discipline actually did to daily life.
  • Devine, T. M. (1994). Clanship to Crofters' War: The Social Transformation of the Scottish Highlands. Manchester University Press.
  • Devine, T. M. (2018). The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed. Allen Lane.
  • Richards, E. (2000). The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil. Birlinn.
  • Carmichael, A. (1900). Carmina Gadelica. Full text, and his introduction in particular, which is explicit about collecting the obsolete.
  • Robertson, H. (1976). Studies in Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica. Scottish Gaelic Studies, 12(2).
  • Carmichael Watson Project, University of Edinburgh.
  • Black, R. (ed.) (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld. Birlinn.
  • Trevor-Roper, H. (1983). The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland. In Hobsbawm & Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press. Contentious and worth arguing with.
  • National Records of Scotland — kirk session records.
  • Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches — field recordings from Gaelic and Scots tradition bearers.
  • Canmore — Historic Environment Scotland's national record of sites.

Related: [Named and Unnamed: The Scottish Witch Trials]; [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]; [Marks on the Beam]; [Gaelic for Practitioners]