In the winter of 1662, the judicial machinery of the Scottish witch trials turned its attention toward an individual identified in the records only as the middle son of Soirle McAllester. A resident of the Isle of Bute, this man was brought before the authorities on January 28, 1662, as documented in case file C/JO/3253. While the primary sources note the difficulty of modernizing his given name, the legal proceedings initiated against him—formally recorded under trial T/JO/1904—mark him as part of the significant wave of prosecutions that swept through the islands and the western coast of Scotland during that volatile mid-seventeenth-century period.
The archival trail for the middle son of Soirle McAllester remains sparse, offering little beyond the administrative details of his emergence into the legal system of Bute. As is often the case with such brief entries, the records focus on the mechanics of his indictment rather than the particulars of the accusations leveled against him. He stands in the historical record as one of many individuals whose lives were abruptly intersected by the ecclesiastical and secular anxieties of the era, leaving a silent testimony to the localized nature of justice in the seventeenth-century Hebrides.