In June 1727, the town of Dornoch in Sutherland became the site of a grim milestone in Scottish legal history with the trial of Janet Horne. As a resident of this northern burgh, Janet found herself caught within the mechanisms of a judicial system that, despite the waning fervor of the post-Reformation era, still operated under statutes that criminalized the practice of witchcraft. The records of the case, indexed under C/EGD/2095, document a period in which the remnants of late seventeenth-century anxieties regarding the supernatural continued to intersect with local administration and the expectations of the community.
Janet faced proceedings that occurred at a time when such trials had become increasingly rare, marking her case as a notable, albeit tragic, late entry into the corpus of Scottish witch-hunting records. While the surviving documentation is concise, the administrative trail left by the authorities in Dornoch underscores the gravity with which the accusation was treated by those in power. Janet’s experience reflects the complex social and legal pressures of early eighteenth-century Sutherland, capturing a singular moment of upheaval preserved in the judicial archives of the period.