In the spring of 1650, the legal machinery of the Scottish kirk and state turned its attention toward Catherine Montgomerie, a resident of the coastal town of Saltcoats in the parish of Ardrossan, Ayrshire. On the 22nd of April, Catherine was formally entered into the judicial record under case number C/EGD/1831. At a time when the Covenanting government intensified its scrutiny of local communities, the initiation of these proceedings marked the beginning of a precarious transition from local suspicion to formal legal interrogation.
The subsequent procedural history of the case, designated under reference T/LA/1764, highlights the structured nature of Catherine’s trial within the early modern Scottish justice system. While the surviving documentation focuses on the administrative categorization of her prosecution, it situates Catherine within the wider context of the mid-seventeenth-century witch hunts that proliferated across the southwest of Scotland. These records serve as the definitive account of her encounter with the authorities, documenting the formal steps taken against her as the case moved from initial record-keeping toward the eventual judicial resolution of her trial.