In October 1675, Geilles Robertsone, a fifty-year-old resident of the coastal burgh of Crail in Fife, found herself at the centre of a judicial inquiry into the crime of witchcraft. At this stage of her life, Geilles was a woman of settled maturity, evidenced by the presence of her adult children, including a son who had already entered into marriage. The proceedings against her were formally documented under the case reference C/EGD/1904, marking the beginning of a process that would ultimately bring her before the courts.
Following the initial accusation, the judicial process culminated in a formal confession, a central component of the seventeenth-century Scottish legal framework for handling such charges. Her case file, indexed in the trial records under T/JO/1694, preserves the history of this interaction between the individual and the legal authorities of the period. While the specific content of her testimony remains tied to the formal ledger of the court, the existence of the confession record remains the definitive trace of Geilles’s involvement in this protracted and solemn legal undertaking.