In the summer of 1661, Margaret Watson, a resident of the village of Gilmerton in the parish of Liberton near Edinburgh, found herself drawn into the judicial machinery of the Scottish witch trials. On June 28, 1661, her case (C/EGD/1602) was formally recorded, marking the beginning of a rapid legal process that would lead her from the local community to the High Court of Justiciary.
The subsequent proceedings moved with the grim efficiency characteristic of the era, as documented in the trial records T/JO/427 and T/JO/428. Following the judicial verdict of the court, Margaret was sentenced to death. Consistent with the sentencing protocols for those convicted of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Scotland, she was executed by burning.