On 18 September 1590, a married woman named Marion McNab, a resident of Lecropt in the county of Stirling, became the subject of formal legal proceedings regarding allegations of witchcraft. The documentation of her case is rooted in the ecclesiastical and judicial landscape of the period, appearing within the records of the Stirling presbytery, despite her home parish falling under the jurisdiction of the Dunblane presbytery. This jurisdictional nuance highlights the gravity with which the local authorities viewed the charges brought against her, necessitating intervention beyond her immediate parish borders.
Following her apprehension, Marion underwent a process of examination that resulted in a recorded confession on the same day as the initiation of her case, 18 September 1590. The trial process, cataloged under record T/JO/1436, moved forward based upon this formal admission. While historians must distinguish her case from a separate individual of the same name who appeared in Stirling records decades later in 1649, the specific account of Marion McNab remains a distinct entry in the chronicles of the late sixteenth-century Scottish witch trials.