In the autumn of 1661, the legal machinery of the Scottish state focused its attention on Mary Burges, a woman whose existence was defined by the precariousness of a landless life. Recorded in the Register of the Privy Council as a vagabond, Mary had spent her recent years traversing the regions of Strathspey and Moray before her apprehension in Inverness. Her itinerant lifestyle, common among those without property or formal household ties in seventeenth-century Scotland, placed her outside the traditional structures of parish oversight, rendering her a figure of both vulnerability and suspicion in an era defined by intense anxieties regarding witchcraft.
On October 2, 1661, the formal process against Mary commenced under the classification C/JO/2895. While the specific testimony or judicial summaries from her subsequent trial remain lost to time, the historical record confirms that a confession was formally obtained from her in that same year. This document stands as the final trace of her encounter with the court, marking the culmination of a process that saw Mary transition from a transient presence in the Highlands to the subject of a criminal inquiry. Her story remains one of the many fragments of the 1661 witch-hunt, preserved solely through these spare bureaucratic notations.