In the early summer of 1629, Katherine Mairschell, a resident of Athelstane in Peebles, became caught in the sweeping judicial net of the Scottish witch trials. On 11 June, Katherine was formally named in a legal process alongside twenty-six other individuals. This collective indictment, recorded under case file C/EGD/644, reflects the administrative scale often seen in the Scottish courts, where accusations frequently rippled outward from a single community, drawing multiple inhabitants into the gravity of the legal proceedings.
The archival trail for Katherine follows a standardized path through the Scottish justice system, with her name appearing in both the primary case documentation and the formal trial records (T/JO/547). While the surviving records do not detail the specific accusations leveled against her, the inclusion of Katherine within a group of twenty-seven people suggests a communal experience of suspicion that characterized the period. Her presence in these official registers marks the intersection of local tension and the reach of the seventeenth-century judiciary, preserving her role as a subject of inquiry in the history of the Peebles region.