Where is it?
The Witches Memorial is in Forfar Loch Country Park, right off the paved path. It’s situated in a landscaped “cauldron” garden beside a hawthorn.
Why do you go there?
For many years I’ve been visiting and writing about memorials and places in the landscape devoted to women persecuted as witches.
This memorial, erected by Mark and Marie Cashley, remains my favourite. It’s a small cenotaph etched with “Forfar Witches – Just People” and a circle of dots, like the blueprint for a neolithic henge. Each mark represents a victim of the Forfar witch hunts.
The shade of the hawthorn and the shimmering loch invite you to stay with the stone. Here, people killed by the state for an imagined crime are brought back into the fold of the community.
How often do you go?
Once a year I make a pilgrimage at one of the cross-quarter days between a solstice and an equinox – Imbolc in February or Samhain in October. They are liminal days, sometimes mentioned by women accused of witchcraft in their troubling confessions.
How did you discover it?
A friend from California was visiting her dying mother in Forres and she went to the Witches Stone there – an unassuming boulder right in front of the police station. She poured whisky over it as an offering.
I decided to carry on the tradition she had begun in Forres and find as many of these places as I could across Scotland, researching the lives the memorials represent. This obsession became the book Ashes and Stones.
When I began writing, the Forfar monument was the most recent. But, since the book’s completion, new monuments have been created in Kirkwall, Fife, and Peebles.
What’s your favourite memory?
One early spring day the stone was surrounded with snowdrops. I was sitting beside it and thinking of accused witches in Forfar, specifically Helen Guthrie and her daughter Joanet.
A little girl stopped and asked her mother what I was doing. Her mother said: “She’s come to remember people who died.” For a moment, we were united through time and space in this place – the mother and daughter, Helen and Joanet, and me.
It struck me that this is the true purpose of a memorial, a place where we share our grief, outrage and compassion.
Who do you take?
My partner who accompanies me on all my explorations.
What do you take?
The memory of those who died, the fragments of their lives that I’ve written about, so I can envision them there by the loch in better times.
What do you leave behind?
People executed for witchcraft were denied funeral rites. I leave invented words of ceremony hoping this might help their souls to rest.
Sum it up in five words.
Tenebrous. Liminal. Communal. Sheltered. Sanctified.
What other travel spot is on your wish list?
I’ve just begun researching accused witches in Shetland and Orkney. In the coming year, I’ll explore the islands through the eyes of these women.
Ashes and Stones: A Scottish Journey in Search of Witches and Witness by Allyson Shaw (Sceptre, £18.99)
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