In May 1640, fifty-year-old Marion Maguate was brought before the church in Nisbet, Coulter, where she provided a formal confession that would ultimately anchor the legal proceedings against her. At the time of this initial recording, the parish fell under the jurisdiction of Lanark, though the subsequent administrative restructuring of the region would eventually place her community within the Biggar presbytery. The ecclesiastical records preserve the gravity of these proceedings, marking the beginning of a process that moved from the local congregation into the more formal machinery of the Scottish judicial system.
By the summer of 1642, the case against Marion had progressed to a formal trial. Throughout these challenging proceedings, she was not without support; the records note that her son, by then an adult, appeared before the presbytery meetings to offer a defense on her behalf. This familial intervention provides a rare glimpse into the personal dimensions of the legal struggle, highlighting the presence of kin in the public testimony that defined her experience within the seventeenth-century Scottish justice system.