In the summer of 1661, Margaret Hill, an indweller of the parish of Liberton on the outskirts of Edinburgh, found herself drawn into the machinery of the Scottish judicial system. Occupying a middling socioeconomic status within her community, Margaret was identified in the Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland as a resident of standing before her formal entanglement with the law. On June 13, 1661, her name was entered into the court records under case reference C/EGD/1589, marking the beginning of a legal process that would see her appearance before the High Court of Justiciary.
The subsequent judicial trajectory of Margaret culminated in a trial recorded under reference T/JO/1709. While the brevity of the surviving documentation leaves the specific nature of the allegations against her obscured to modern eyes, the records confirm her transition from a private resident of Liberton to a subject of formal criminal proceedings during one of the most intense periods of witch-hunting in seventeenth-century Scotland. These archival traces serve as the primary markers of her experience, documenting her progression through the legal institutions of the period until the conclusion of her trial.