In the summer of 1662, the legal machinery of the Scottish state focused its attention upon Mary Nein Gowin, a married woman residing in the settlement of Buntoit, within the parish of Kiltarlity and Convinth in Inverness-shire. By late July of that year, records indicate that she had been processed through the judicial system under the designation C/EGD/1573. While the specific nature of the allegations brought against her remains obscured by the passage of time and the limited detail contained within the extant court documentation, the proceedings reached a critical juncture in June 1662, when a formal confession was extracted from her.
Following this confession, Mary was subjected to a trial under the official reference T/JO/980. Despite the gravity of the legal process, the surviving archival record provides no further narrative regarding the specific testimonies offered, the identity of her accusers, or the ultimate verdict reached by the court. Her case stands as a representative example of the localized judicial interventions that characterized the mid-seventeenth-century pursuit of witchcraft in the Highlands, where the intersection of communal suspicion and formal inquiry often concluded with little more than a stark administrative notation.