Maggie Wall: The Witch Monument to a Woman Who May Never Have Existed

On a quiet stretch of road between the village of Dunning and the town of Auchterarder in Perthshire, a stone cairn rises roughly twenty feet from a field, topped with a cross, its surface painted with stark white lettering that has been repainted by unknown hands for as long as anyone can remember. The inscription reads, simply: Maggie Wall burnt here 1657 as a witch.

It is the only monument of its kind in Scotland, the sole memorial anywhere in the country erected specifically and explicitly to a single named victim of the witch trials, in a nation that executed somewhere between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred people for witchcraft across two centuries and has never, even now, raised a national monument to any of them collectively.

And there is no record that Maggie Wall ever existed.

A Monument With No Person Behind It

The most basic fact about Maggie Wall, the fact from which every other question about her radiates outward, is this: detailed legal records survive from the Scottish witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, kept with a bureaucratic thoroughness that has allowed historians to document the cases of Isobel Gowdie, the North Berwick accused, and thousands of others with real specificity. Maggie Wall’s name appears nowhere in any of them.

This is not, on its own, conclusive. Records from the period are incomplete, particularly for trials conducted at a local rather than a national level, and the absence of a name from the surviving documentary record does not prove that the person never existed, only that no surviving paperwork mentions her. But the absence is striking precisely because of how specific and confident the monument’s own claim is. It does not say a witch was burnt here. It gives a name, a date, and a verdict, with the kind of precision that genuine historical record-keeping tends to produce and genuine historical erasure tends to leave gaps around.

What is known with more confidence is that Dunning did have its own witch trials. In 1662, several people, by most accounts somewhere between six and nine individuals, were arrested and tried for witchcraft in the area, under the authority of local gentry that included Lord Rollo and his brother. Three of the accused were executed, strangled before burning according to the standard Scottish method, with the burning itself reportedly carried out beneath an oak tree in nearby Kincladie Wood. This much sits on reasonably solid historical ground. Maggie Wall’s name is not among those recorded as having been part of it, and the date on her monument, 1657, does not even match the documented 1662 trial.

When the Monument Actually Appeared

If Maggie Wall the person is difficult to trace, the monument itself is almost equally difficult to date with precision, and the uncertainty here has produced a genuine scholarly disagreement rather than a single settled answer.

The wooded area surrounding the monument’s current location was recorded on an Ordnance Survey map of 1829 under the name Maggie Walls Wood, sometimes rendered Muggie Walls Wood, which establishes that some version of the name was already attached to this specific piece of ground by the early nineteenth century. The monument itself is first clearly documented in written sources from the 1850s, described in the Perthshire Advertiser, and appears on the Ordnance Survey map of 1866. Analysis of the stones themselves, including traces of gunpowder consistent with quarrying or construction techniques of the period, has led some researchers to place the monument’s actual construction as early as the 1790s, considerably earlier than its first appearance in print.

What this means, taken together, is that the monument almost certainly postdates the supposed 1657 burning by at least a century, and possibly closer to two. A memorial raised this long after the event it claims to commemorate, naming a person who appears in no contemporary legal record, is not unique in the world of folk monuments, but it does shift the central question of Maggie Wall from who was she to why was this built, and by whom, and to what purpose.

The Competing Theories

Serious historians and folklorists who have examined the Maggie Wall question have arrived at several different and not entirely compatible explanations, and the honest position is that none of them has achieved anything like consensus.

The folklorist and author Geoff Holder, who examined the case at length in his work on Perthshire’s paranormal traditions, concluded that the monument is most likely an eighteenth century folly or cenotaph, and that Maggie Wall herself is essentially a composite figure, her name lifted directly from the nearby field and wood that already carried some version of it on earlier maps, rather than being the actual name of any specific historical victim. In this reading, the monument was conceived from the outset as a memorial to all the women executed in Dunning’s witch trials, with Maggie Wall functioning as a kind of representative or symbolic figure rather than a real individual.

The historian Dr Louise Yeoman, working with archaeologist David Connolly, has proposed a different and more structurally specific theory. They argue that the monument’s underlying form is not original to its current purpose at all, but began as a clearance cairn, the kind of stone pile that accumulates in agricultural land as farmers clear rocks from fields to make ploughing easier, which was then topped with a cross at a later date and repurposed into a memorial. Yeoman has further suggested a specific motive for that repurposing: that the Rollo family, whose ancestors had presided over the actual 1662 trials and executions, may have felt a degree of inherited shame by the nineteenth century, and that erecting or adapting this monument was an act of quiet, indirect atonement, commemorating the victims of trials their own family had once authorised, under a name that did not implicate any specific living descendant or any specific real victim by accurate record.

A third and more local tradition holds that Maggie was a real individual after all, her absence from the legal record explained not by her non-existence but by a deliberate later erasure. The Perthshire historian Archie McKerracher has raised the possibility that whatever circumstances led to her death may have been considered shameful enough, whether to the local clergy, the Rollo family, or the wider community, that officials at the time chose not to record them, leaving a gap in the documentary history that has nothing to do with whether the underlying event actually occurred.

The Riot and the Reverend

Among the more specific theories attached to Maggie Wall’s possible identity is one connected to a genuine and well-documented episode of local unrest in Dunning during the 1650s, the very decade her monument claims for her death.

The parish minister, a Reverend Muschet, found himself the subject of significant local controversy during this period, and when church officials arrived in the village intending to hold a synod with the specific purpose of disciplining him, they were reportedly driven off by a mob of angry local women defending their minister. This is a genuine and documented piece of Dunning’s seventeenth century history, and several writers examining the Maggie Wall question have speculated that she may have been one of the women involved in that disturbance, potentially singled out afterward for punishment in a manner that, for whatever reason, never made its way into the surviving witch trial records specifically, even if some other form of retribution against her was recorded or remembered locally under a different framing entirely.

This theory has the advantage of placing a real woman in a real, documented Dunning event from precisely the right decade. It has the disadvantage of being, like every other theory in this article, ultimately unprovable on the evidence currently available.

The Skull in the Glasgow Pub

One of the stranger footnotes to the Maggie Wall tradition involves a skull displayed in a glass case behind the bar of the Saracen Head, a historic pub in Glasgow’s Gallowgate, which the establishment has for some years presented to visitors as the skull of Maggie Wall, described in the pub’s own framing as the last witch burned at the stake in Scotland (You can read about the history of the pub on Old Glasgow Pub’s website here.

This claim does not survive even cursory historical scrutiny. The title of the last person executed for witchcraft in Scotland belongs, on the documented legal record, to Janet Horne, burned in Dornoch in 1727, seventy years after Maggie Wall’s monument claims its own date. Whatever skull the Saracen Head actually possesses, its connection to a woman who may never have existed in the first place, executed seven decades before the genuinely documented final case, is firmly in the territory of pub legend rather than historical artefact. It is included here not because it adds genuine evidence to the Maggie Wall case, but because it demonstrates how thoroughly the uncertain, half-real figure of Maggie Wall has been absorbed into Scotland’s wider culture of witch-trial storytelling, acquiring relics and attributions of her own regardless of how thin the underlying historical ground actually is.

What People Leave at the Cairn

Whatever the truth of her origins, Maggie Wall’s monument has become a genuine site of ongoing folk pilgrimage, and the offerings visitors leave at its base, pennies, shells, feathers, small stuffed toys, tea candles, painted stones, have accumulated steadily for as long as the monument has been documented.

Some of these offerings carry a specific and pointed message. Among the more recent additions recorded at the site is a painted stone reading, in reference to the broader campaign for formal recognition of Scotland’s witch trial victims: for the failed women of Scotland, you still deserve so much better. This connects Maggie Wall’s uncertain memorial directly to the contemporary work of organisations such as Witches of Scotland, who continue to campaign for an official pardon, a formal apology, and a genuine national monument to the thousands of documented victims of the Scottish witch trials, a monument that, as several of the sources researching Maggie Wall have pointed out, does not yet exist anywhere in the country despite the existence of this single uncertain memorial to a woman whose own historical reality cannot be confirmed.

A Note on What Happened There in 2018

It would be dishonest to write about the Maggie Wall monument without acknowledging a genuine and recent tragedy connected to the site, one that deserves to be treated with the seriousness it warrants rather than folded into the broader atmosphere of folklore and speculation that surrounds the monument’s older history.

In May 2018, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Annalise Johnstone was murdered at the Maggie Wall monument. As of the most recent available information, nobody has been brought to justice for her death. A painted stone left at the cairn, recorded by visitors in subsequent years, addresses this directly and movingly: Maggie Wall may not have existed, but Annalise Johnstone did.

This is included here not as an additional piece of atmospheric horror to be folded into the site’s broader collection of dark history, but because it is true, because it happened at this specific real location, and because any honest account of what Maggie Wall’s monument means to the people who actually visit it today has to include the fact that it now also marks the site of a genuine, unsolved, modern crime against a real young woman whose name deserves to be remembered alongside the question of whether the monument’s original namesake ever lived at all.

What the Monument Actually Memorialises

Setting aside the unresolved question of Maggie Wall’s individual historical existence, the monument itself accomplishes something that is, in its own way, more significant than the resolution of that single biographical mystery would be.

Scotland executed somewhere between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred people for witchcraft between the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1563 and its repeal in 1736, a death toll that places the country among the most intensive sites of witch persecution anywhere in Europe relative to its population, and the overwhelming majority of those executed were women. Despite this, no national monument to those victims exists in Scotland today. The campaign for one, led by organisations like Witches of Scotland, continues into the present.

In the absence of that national reckoning, a roadside cairn outside a small Perthshire village, possibly built as a folly, possibly repurposed from a farmer’s clearance pile, possibly raised in genuine guilt by a family whose ancestors presided over real executions, has become, almost by accident, the closest thing Scotland has to a public memorial for this entire chapter of its history. Whether or not Maggie Wall herself ever stood trial, ever was condemned, ever burned on that particular ground in 1657, the cairn that bears her name has come to stand, for the people who visit it and leave their pennies and their painted stones, for every woman whose name did not survive the record at all.

Perhaps that is not such a bad thing for a monument to become, even one built on uncertain ground.

The lettering will need repainting again before long. Someone will see to it, as someone always has. And the field beside the road will go on holding whatever it actually holds, whether that is the memory of a real woman named Maggie, or simply the old name of a wood that gave a later memorial something to call itself.