In the spring of 1662, the small settlement of Crook of Devon, situated within the parish of Fossoway and Tullibole in Perthshire, became the site of a legal inquiry involving a woman named Bessie Neil. On the 23rd of April that year, official records designated as case C/EGD/1486 were opened, marking her entry into the formal judicial process of the early modern Scottish witch trials. This region, positioned at the intersection of local jurisdictions, was subject to the rigorous scrutiny of the kirk sessions and secular courts that characterized the period’s approach to allegations of maleficium.
The documentary evidence surviving for Bessie provides a stark, administrative silhouette of her encounter with the law. While the available records are concise, they anchor her experience within the broader historical framework of the 1662 trials, a period noted for its intensity in the rural districts of Scotland. For Bessie, the legal proceedings initiated in April signified the beginning of a process that placed her at the center of a community-wide examination, reflective of the social and theological anxieties that dominated life in Fossoway and Tullibole during the seventeenth century.