In the early summer of 1677, Margaret Wright, a fifty-year-old resident of Balvie in the parish of New Kilpatrick, Dunbarton, found herself at the centre of a formal legal inquiry. On 21 June, official records identified her under the case reference C/EGD/1755, marking the commencement of proceedings against her. At this stage in her life, Margaret was subject to the rigorous judicial scrutiny typical of the period, as the local authorities processed the allegations brought against her.
While the administrative records confirm that Margaret was subsequently brought to trial under the reference T/JO/621, the surviving documentation remains silent regarding the specific nature of the evidence presented or the particular acts of witchcraft of which she was accused. The trial notes contain no further details concerning the testimonies provided or the ultimate verdict reached in her case. Consequently, Margaret remains a figure defined by the brief, stark entries of the Scottish judicial system, representing one of the many individuals whose lives were intersected by the legal mechanisms of the seventeenth-century witch trials.