Edinburgh witch tour: what the trials actually were, and which tour tells it straight

The thing that gets lost in the marketing is that this was a legal system doing what it believed to be its job. The Witchcraft Act of 1563 made witchcraft a capital offence in Scotland. It stayed on the statute book until the Witchcraft Act of 1736 repealed it and replaced the crime of witchcraft with the much lesser offence of pretending to have magical powers.

Between those two dates the Scottish courts generated an enormous amount of paper, and in the 2000s a project at the University of Edinburgh went through it. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft documents 3,837 named people accused. The great majority were women, most of them poor, and a large proportion of the accusations came from their own neighbours rather than from the authorities.

Scotland prosecuted witchcraft at a rate several times higher than England did, relative to population. That is the fact that makes this a Scottish story rather than a generic one, and it is the fact that the better guides in this city build their hour around.

The North Berwick trials of 1590 and 1591 are the hinge of the whole Scottish story, and they are unusual for one reason: the king took part.

James VI of Scotland — later James I of England — involved himself personally in the examinations. In 1597 he published Daemonologie, a treatise arguing for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of prosecuting it. It is an extraordinary document: a reigning monarch writing a manual on the subject, which then circulated as authority.

You can draw a straight line from that book to the intensity of Scottish prosecutions over the following century. It is also the reason a good witch tour in this city spends time at the castle end of the Royal Mile rather than in a graveyard — the story starts at the top of the hill, in a court, not in a kirkyard.

Ghosts, Mysteries and Witches at $22 is the direct answer. Two hours, at night, through kirkyards and hidden closes, and it holds a 4.9 rating. The review count is small — thirty-two — so treat the rating as indicative rather than settled, but the reviews themselves consistently describe a guide who deals in what actually happened.

Dark Secrets of the Old Town at $25 is two hours across Canongate Kirkyard and the nineteenth-century body-snatching sites, with the witch material as part of a broader social history. 2,456 reviews at 4.6, so a much safer sample.

The Darkside tour at $28 is the highest-rated substantial tour on this whole site — 4.8 across 1,497 reviews — and works mysteries, murder and legend across two hours with a licensed local guide. It is the broadest of the three rather than the most focused.

What none of them are is underground. The witch story happened on the street and in the courts, and any tour that takes you into the South Bridge vaults to tell it is telling you about a bridge that was built two centuries after the trials began.

In March 2022 the Scottish Government issued a formal apology to those accused under the Witchcraft Act, and there has been a continuing campaign for a pardon and a national memorial.

It matters for how you hear the tour. This is not a settled piece of costume history that everybody has agreed to find entertaining. It is a live question about how a country accounts for what its own courts did, and the guides in this city who handle it well are noticeably careful with it.

If a tour treats the accused as a Halloween prop, you have booked the wrong one. The three listed above do not.

The popular picture is of an all-powerful church hunting victims. The records show something more uncomfortable: a process that usually started at ground level, among neighbours.

A typical case began with local suspicion — a quarrel, an illness, livestock that died, a reputation for a sharp tongue. It was raised with the kirk session, the parish-level church court, which examined the matter and, if it thought there was something in it, referred it upwards. Only then did the secular authorities become involved, and only a commission could authorise a trial for a capital offence.

That is why the Survey of Scottish Witchcraft matters so much. Because the process generated paper at every stage, 3,837 named people can be identified. It also explains the pattern of who was accused: overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly poor, and very often people who had already been in conflict with the neighbours who named them.

A guide who tells you this is telling you something considerably darker than a ghost story, and it is entirely documented.