In May 1649, Agnes Tailzeor, a married woman residing in the port town of Bo'ness in Linlithgow, found herself at the centre of a formal legal process regarding the charge of witchcraft. The proceedings commenced on 15 May, when the local kirk session—the lowest court of the Church of Scotland, composed of the minister and local elders—formally attested to a confession that Agnes had made. This act of denunciation served as the critical precursor to the higher legal scrutiny that followed shortly thereafter.
By 22 May 1649, the case (recorded in the archives as C/EGD/1614) moved into the trial phase. Official records confirm that a confession was indeed documented during these proceedings, a pivotal element in the judicial framework of seventeenth-century Scottish witch trials. While the specific nature of the allegations remains contained within the surviving trial documentation (T/LA/1956), the involvement of the kirk session and the subsequent formal recording of her confession illustrate the standard bureaucratic and ecclesiastical path such accusations followed in mid-seventeenth-century Scotland.