The historical record for Janet Robison, a resident of Gilmerton in the parish of Liberton, Edinburgh, offers a fleeting but significant glimpse into the reach of the witch-hunting climate of 1661. Unlike those individuals who faced the full procedural rigour of the Scottish High Court of Justiciary, Janet’s name surfaces not within an independent criminal trial, but as an incidental reference embedded within the records of another person’s prosecution. This secondary documentation indicates that Janet was formally identified as a witch by contemporaries, though the specific grievances or accusations that prompted this designation remain absent from the surviving archival material.
Due to the lack of a primary trial record, historians have found that the details of Janet's life and the circumstances surrounding her alleged involvement in witchcraft are largely obscured. While researchers such as Larner et al. have catalogued the reference to Janet under case number C/EGD/423 (formerly cross-referenced with JC26/27), exhaustive surveys of the relevant judicial boxes have failed to produce a trial record for her. Consequently, Janet exists in the historical record solely through the lens of another’s legal proceedings, standing as an example of the often-fragmentary nature of documentation regarding those caught in the periphery of seventeenth-century witch-hunting investigations.