UK Witch Trials: The Real History & Best Sites to Visit (England and Scotland)

England tried 513 people for witchcraft between 1560 and 1700 and executed around 112 of them; Scotland accused roughly 3,837 and executed somewhere between 1,500 and 2,500 a far higher rate per capita. Around 90% of those executed across Britain were women. Scotland’s government formally apologised in 2022, but a legal pardon was never passed. The best sites to visit span Pendle Hill in Lancashire, Boscastle’s Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall, Edinburgh’s Witches’ Well, and dozens more covered below.

There were many famous European witch trials, and the witch trials in England and Scotland included stories of famous accused witches and the places where they lived and practised around the United Kingdom. That passion actually goes back further than my travels I studied the history of these trials across Europe at university, as part of my degree in Women’s Studies, long before I ever set foot on any of the sites myself.

I stI enjoy seeking out these locations when I travel, and the history of witchcraft trials in England is one of my genuine passions. Eighteen years living in the UK gave me the time to visit sites in Ireland which, notably, did not suffer the same hysteria as the rest of Europe when it came to witches and many sites across England and Scotland.

Fast Facts

England: tried / executed (1560–1700)	513 tried, ~112 executed
Scotland: accused / executed (1563–1736)	~3,837 accused (84% women), ~1,500–2,500 executed
Wales: executed	5 total
Last English execution	Devon, 1685 (Alice Molland may have survived, per 2024 research)
Last English trial	Leicester, 1717 acquitted
Last Scottish execution	1706; last trial 1727
Method: England vs Scotland	England hanging. Scotland strangled, then burned
Formal apology	Nicola Sturgeon, 8 March 2022 (Scotland)
Legal pardon	None Bill withdrawn 2023, no pardon in law

Planning Your Visit: Pairing the Sites

These sites cluster geographically far more naturally than a straight list suggests here’s how to turn this into an actual trip rather than a scattered checklist:

Lancashire: Lancaster Castle, Pendle Hill, Malkin Tower, Gallows Hill and Roughlee all sit within a single day-trip radius, linked by the existing Pendle Witches Trail.

Yorkshire: Mother Shipton’s Cave (Knaresborough) and York (Isabella Billington, York Dungeons) pair naturally into a Yorkshire weekend and since Lancashire and Yorkshire border each other, the two regions combine well into a longer trip.

East Anglia: Bury St Edmunds, Framlingham Castle, Mistley, Colchester Castle, Chelmsford, Canewdon and St Osyth all sit within a couple of hours of each other in Suffolk and Essex dense enough to be its own themed weekend.

South West: Boscastle’s Museum of Witchcraft and Magic and Bideford/Exeter sit roughly two hours apart in Cornwall and Devon.

Edinburgh and the Lothians: The Witches’ Well sits on the Royal Mile itself; North Berwick is a 40-minute drive away, making it an easy add-on day trip from an Edinburgh base.

UK Witch Trials Map

How Many Witch Trials Were There in the UK?

The number of witch trials across the UK varied enormously by region, with Scotland experiencing the highest number of both trials and executions by a wide margin.

England: Between 1560 and 1700, 513 people had witchcraft accusations brought against them and were tried in England. Only around 112 of them were actually executed a conviction-to-execution rate far lower than popular accounts suggest. The last known execution took place in Devon in 1685, and the final trial was held in Leicester in 1717.

Scotland: Scotland saw a 2003 University of Edinburgh study identify 3,837 formal accusations of witchcraft between 1563 and 1736, around 84% of them against women. Roughly 2,500 were convicted, and estimates of executions range from about 1,500 to 2,500 a rate historians estimate at roughly five times the European average per capita. The last recorded executions took place in 1706, and the final trial in 1727.

Wales: Despite widespread fear of witchcraft, only five people were executed for it in Wales a strikingly low number, often attributed to a scarcity of Welsh-speaking judges and examiners, and communities that continued relying on local “wise women” rather than turning on them.

Europe: Elsewhere in Europe, France saw well over 2,000 witch trials, and the Basque witch trials in Spain between 1609 and 1614 saw as many as 7,000 people accused.

How many witches were killed in England?

Around 112 people were executed for witchcraft in England, almost all by hanging. Burning at the stake for witchcraft was a Scottish practice, not an English one in Scotland the condemned were strangled first, then their bodies burned, and more than 1,500 people met that fate there.

When was the last witch trial in England?

The last trial was held in 1717 in Leicester, where the accused was found not guilty by the jury effectively the end of witch trials in England, decades before the 1736 Witchcraft Act formally ended prosecutions.

Which region of England had the highest levels of witchcraft accusations?

East Anglia Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex saw by far the highest concentration, particularly between 1645 and 1647, driven almost entirely by one man: Matthew Hopkins.

History of Witches

Witch trials in England began in the 15th century and continued into the 18th. They were most frequent in the first half of the 17th century, reaching their most intense phase during the English Civil War of the 1640s and the Puritan era of the 1650s a period defined by self-appointed witch hunters like Matthew Hopkins.

Estimates for the whole of Britain England and Scotland combined put the death toll at somewhere between 500 and 2,600 people over the period, the vast majority women (historians estimate around 90%). The figures are inexact because so many records were destroyed over the centuries; the England and Scotland figures above, drawn from Parliamentary and academic sources, are the most reliable available.

It was Elizabeth I who, in 1562, passed the Act Against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts. The punishment was death, but only where harm had actually been caused lesser offences were punished by imprisonment instead.

When King James VI of Scotland came to power as James I of England in 1603, following Elizabeth’s death, he brought his own obsession with witchcraft with him, reshaping the Witchcraft Act after being personally shaken by the North Berwick witch trials in Scotland in 1590.

The Gendered History of the Witch Trials

It’s not possible to tell this history honestly without confronting who was actually targeted, and why. Around 90% of those executed across Britain were women disproportionately older, poor, widowed, or unmarried, and disproportionately those who worked as healers, herbalists and midwives. The Pendle case below is a clear example: several of the accused were, by modern historians’ assessment, simply earning a living from herbal cures, charms and folk remedies passed down as practical knowledge, not diabolism.

That pattern punishing the women who held informal medical and spiritual authority in their communities is central to how modern campaigners understand the trials. Witches of Scotland, the campaign that secured Nicola Sturgeon’s 2022 apology, describes the witch hunts as fundamentally a “gendered issue,” arguing that the same patriarchal attitudes that drove accusations 400 years ago still show up today in different forms in the harassment, threats and abuse women continue to face. The campaign’s founders have been explicit that they see this as a historical wrong worth confronting precisely because its underlying logic blaming women, particularly older or economically marginal women, for misfortune never fully went away.

It’s also worth noting witch persecution isn’t only historical: campaigners point out that witch accusations, torture and killings continue today in parts of Papua New Guinea, India and elsewhere, often against women in similarly marginal social positions the same underlying dynamic playing out in the present.

The Swimming Test

What was drowning witches in England meant to signify?

The “swimming test” was used to determine guilt: the belief was that water, a pure element, would reject a witch. If the bound accused floated, that was taken as proof of guilt; if they sank, they were considered innocent but sinking obviously risked genuine, accidental drowning, making the test dangerous regardless of the outcome it was meant to prove.

Eleanor Cobham and Margery Jourdemayne

Eleanor and Margery are the first witches noted in medieval England, from a period before witchcraft was formally a criminal offence the large-scale witch hunts didn’t begin until the second half of the 16th century.

Eleanor Cobham was an English noblewoman, mistress and then second wife to the Duke of Gloucester. In 1441 he divorced her after she was charged with witchcraft by King Henry VI. Immortalised by Shakespeare in Henry VI, Eleanor was accused of trying to assassinate the King through sorcery she had consulted astrologers who predicted he would fall gravely ill, and when the rumours reached the King, the astrologers were questioned and claimed Eleanor had instigated necromancy. She fled to Westminster Abbey before she could be captured.

Questioned by religious leaders, Eleanor confessed to obtaining “potions” to help her conceive. She was found guilty; her husband divorced her, she was sentenced to do penance and she was condemned to life imprisonment moved between Chester Castle, Kenilworth Castle, the Isle of Man, and finally Beaumaris Castle in Anglesey, where she died on 7 July 1452.

Margery Jourdemayne, known as the ‘Witch of Eye,’ was found to have made the potions for Eleanor. The astrologers Eleanor had used, Southwell and Bolingbroke, were convicted of sorcery Bolingbroke was hanged, drawn and quartered at the Tower of London, and Southwell died in the Tower. Margery was burned at the stake in Smithfield.

The Pendle Witches

The most infamous witch trial in England took place around Pendle Hill in Lancashire. In 1612, twelve people from the area were accused of witchcraft and brought to trial, charged with the murders of ten people by supernatural means.

Lancashire’s distance from London, and its lingering Catholic sympathies, meant the region was already viewed by the authorities as lawless and suspect. From Thomas Potts’s official trial record, The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster, we know six of the accused came from two families, both headed not by men but by women in their eighties. Modern historians believe both women were earning a living as healers, using herbal cures, charms and talismans and that the accusations the two families made against each other may have been rooted in competition for the same trade, as much as genuine belief in witchcraft.

The case began early in 1612 when Alizon Device, out begging on the road to Colne, asked pedlar John Law for pins. When he refused, she reportedly cursed him, and he collapsed almost certainly a stroke, though Alizon herself believed she had caused it, and in her confession described a ‘familiar spirit’ offering to harm him on her behalf. Law forgave her, but his son took the matter to a magistrate, and by the end of April nineteen people had been arrested and sent to Lancaster Castle to await trial.

The trial took place in August 1612. None of the accused were permitted a defence or allowed to call witnesses. Alongside the ten Pendle defendants, the Samlesbury Witches Jennet Bierley, Ellen Bierley and Jane Southworth and others including Isobel Robey of Windle and Margaret Pearson, the ‘Padiham Witch,’ were tried in the same sessions. The evidence was rumour, gossip and personal grievance; the chief witness against the Pendle accused was nine-year-old Jennet Device, granddaughter of the family matriarch known as ‘Old Demdike.’

Ten were found guilty and sentenced to hang: Anne Whittle, Anne Redfearn, Elizabeth Device, Alice Nutter, Alizon Device, James Device, Katherine Hewitt, Jane Bulcock, John Bulcock and Isobel Robey. Under the 1604 Witchcraft Act, the judge had no discretion once guilt was found on 20 August 1612, the ten condemned were taken to the moors above Lancaster and hanged.

Margaret Pearson, the Padiham Witch accused of riding a horse to death was found guilty but not executed. Instead she was pilloried on four consecutive market days across Padiham, Clitheroe, Whalley and Lancaster, then served a year in prison.

The Samlesbury Witches were accused by a teenager, Grace Sowerbutts, of practising witchcraft. Jane Southworth, Jennet Bierley and Ellen Bierley were held in the same dungeon as the Pendle accused, but it emerged that Grace had been coached by a hiding Jesuit priest, Christopher Southworth and once this was read out in court, the judge directed the jury to acquit. All three were freed, along with a fourth woman, Alice Grey. Twenty years later, a boy named Edmund Robinson accused Jennet and sixteen others of witchcraft he later admitted he had lied, and all were acquitted.

The Pendle Witches Trail

Pendle Heritage Centre

The official trail’s actual starting point, in Barrowford near Nelson (Colne Rd, Barrowford, Burnley BB9 6JQ). Housed in Park Hill, a restored farmhouse dating back to the 15th century, it draws over 100,000 visitors a year and combines a small museum on the Pendle witch story with the history of the Bannister family who lived there (Sir Roger Bannister, the first person to run a sub-four-minute mile, is a descendant), an 18th-century walled garden, a woodland walk, and a well-regarded café. Family tickets run around £14.

Lancaster Castle

Lancaster Castle, also known as John O’Gaunt’s Castle, has a thousand-year history that includes some 200 executions, religious persecution, and the Pendle trial itself. Open 9:30–5 daily, the castle houses a walking exhibition on the Pendle story in the medieval Well Tower known as the Witches’ Tower with a cell directly below believed to have held the accused for the three months before their trial.

Trail of the Pendle Witches

A self-guided 45-mile route by car, minibus or bike, starting at either Lancaster or Pendle and following a printed leaflet between the two.

The Lancashire Witches Walk

A distinct, official route: created for the trials’ 400th anniversary in 2012, this 51-mile waymarked walking trail runs from the Pendle Heritage Centre through the Forest of Pendle, Clitheroe and the Forest of Bowland, finishing at Lancaster Castle retracing the route the accused were forced to walk to their trial. Ten cast-iron waymarkers along the way, designed by artist Stephen Raw, are each inscribed with a line from a poem called “Witches,” written specifically for the trail by the then Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.

Pendle Hill Walk

This circular walk climbs to the summit of Pendle Hill, starting in the village of Barley and following the Pendle Way long-distance footpath, with views over the small farms and hamlets that feature in the witches’ story.

Malkin Tower

The suspected site of the Pendle witches’ coven, also known as Demdike’s cottage after Alizon’s grandmother. In 2011, construction work near Lower Black Moss reservoir in Barley uncovered a well-preserved 17th-century cottage with a cat’s skeleton bricked into a sealed room historians speculate it may have belonged to one of the accused.

Gallows Hill

In Williamson Park near the Ashton Memorial, this is where nine of the ten condemned Pendle witches were hanged in 1612 (the tenth was dealt with in York). Lancaster’s executions continued here until 1800, and some visitors claim the Ashton Memorial, which now stands on the site, is haunted.

Alice Nutter Statue, Roughlee

A metal statue in Roughlee commemorates Alice Nutter a Catholic woman in a Puritan world, executed for crimes she almost certainly did not commit.

Walking with Witches Trail

Two way-marked loops from the Barley car park retrace the Pendle witches’ journey: the 4-mile Western Loop, with views of Pendle Hill, and the 3.5-mile Eastern Loop, heading toward Roughlee Hall.

Pendle Witch Experience

A three-hour guided tour taking in the most important Pendle Hill sites alongside the historic tales of the trial.

Further reading: The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories, the first major study of England’s biggest and best-known witch trial.

Boscastle and the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic

Boscastle sits on Cornwall’s wild coast, within a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, five miles from Tintagel, and is home to the world’s largest collection of witchcraft and occult-related items: the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, holding over 7,000 books and 3,000 objects with a practising witch as curator.

The museum began life in Stratford-upon-Avon, moved to the Isle of Man in 1951 (where Gerald Gardner, founder of modern Wicca, served as its ‘resident witch’), and finally settled in Boscastle, opening there in 1960.

Joan Wytte, the Fighting Fairy Woman of Bodmin

Joan Wytte worked as a clairvoyant and healer in 1700s Bodmin. Later in life, worsening ill-tempered due to a bad tooth, she was jailed in Bodmin Jail for public brawling not witchcraft and died there at 38. Her remains were displayed in the museum for over 30 years before being laid to rest in 1998, with a memorial stone reading: “Joan Wytte. Born 1775. Died 1813 in Bodmin Jail. Buried 1998. No longer abused.”

Sybil Leek, the White Witch of Burley

Sybil Leek, from Burley in the New Forest, described herself as a Druid rather than a mere witch: “Witches are the working class,” she said. “The Druids are the priests.” She claimed her family’s involvement in witchcraft dated to 1134, and lectured widely on the mystical and supernatural before emigrating to the US. Burley is still known locally as the Village of Witches Leek’s old shop, A Coven of Witches, remains on the main road through town.

The Rollright Stones

Standing on the Cotswolds’ edge, on the Warwickshire–Oxfordshire border near Chipping Norton, the Rollright Stones are three megalithic monuments the King’s Men, the King Stone and the Whispering Knights that have stood for thousands of years. Legend holds that King Rollandri (Roland the Brave), marching to conquer England, met a witch on a windswept hill above Long Compton who told him:

“If Long Compton thou canst not see, King of England thou shalt not be. Thou and thy men hoar stones shall be, and I shall be an elder tree.”

The king and his men were turned to stone on the spot the King Stone standing alone, his army resting across the road, and his knights still whispering among themselves.

Mother Shipton’s Cave, Knaresborough

Mother Shipton is remembered as a witch and oracle, said to have predicted disasters that befell the Tudor reign some of her supposed prophecies, including the invention of iron ships, are still cited as strikingly accurate. Her cave in Knaresborough, Yorkshire, and the adjoining ‘petrifying well,’ are among the country’s oldest visitor attractions.

Whitby, also in North Yorkshire, has no witch trial history of its own, but travel writers regularly list it among Britain’s “witchiest” towns for its ruined gothic abbey and its Dracula associations worth knowing if that’s what brought you here, even though its reputation is literary rather than historical.

The Witches of East Anglia

Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex made up the historic region of East Anglia and the epicentre of England’s worst witch panic.

The Witchfinder General

Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled Witchfinder General, was responsible for over 300 trials and more than 100 executions, growing wealthy from towns paying him to root out ‘witches’ in Stowmarket, Suffolk alone he’s recorded as earning the equivalent of over £3,300 in today’s money. His pamphlet, The Discovery of Witches, set out his methods.

Lowestoft and Bury St Edmunds

The first recorded Bury St Edmunds trial was in 1599 Jone Jordan and Joane Nayler, with no surviving record of charges or verdict; in the same year, Oliffe Bartham was executed for allegedly “sending three toads to destroy” Joan Jordan. The trials are thought to have been held at the site of the new Shire Hall on Raingate Street, now a Premier Inn.

In 1662, two elderly widows from Lowestoft, Rose Cullender and Amy Denny, were tried at the Bury St Edmunds Assizes before Sir Matthew Hale, one of the era’s most eminent judges, and found guilty on thirteen counts of malevolent witchcraft. They were hanged a week later, on 17 March 1662, at Thingoe Hill a case later cited directly as precedent in the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts.

In 1645, sixteen women and two men including John Lowes, the Vicar of Brandeston were found guilty in the same wave of trials. Accused witches were taken to the building where The Nutshell pub now stands to have their nails cut and hair locks taken, stored in jars in the basement under the superstition that an incomplete body couldn’t return as a witch in the next life.

The last Bury St Edmunds trial was in 1694, when Lord Chief Justice Sir John Holt forced the acquittal of Mother Munnings of Hartest.

Moyse’s Hall

A nearly 900-year-old medieval building overlooking Bury St Edmunds marketplace, now a museum with collections spanning the town’s founding through to prison artefacts and witchcraft-related exhibits.

Framlingham Castle

Unable to extract a confession from 80-year-old Reverend John Lowes, Hopkins had him dunked in the castle moat floating was taken as proof of guilt. Lowes floated, later ‘confessed’ under the despair of the ordeal, but never renounced God or admitted working with the devil. After conducting his own funeral service at All Saints, Brandeston, he was hanged.

Witch Trial Sites in Essex, Norfolk and Sussex

The Mistley Thorn

Matthew Hopkins lived and worked from Mistley during his time as Witchfinder General; he was buried in the village on 12 August 1647. The current Mistley Thorn building dates to 1723 and postdates Hopkins, but stands on the site of the inn from which he began his witch hunts, and is said to be haunted by his spirit.

Colchester Castle

Many accused witches were tortured by Hopkins in the cells of this Norman castle, shackled in an overcrowded, windowless cell. Tours take in the cells where they were held before trial; the castle recently unveiled a plaque honouring the victims imprisoned there.

Market Place, King’s Lynn

The scene of public witch executions through the 16th century. Margaret Read, found guilty in 1590 and burned alive, is the most famous case legend holds her heart burst from her body mid-execution and struck the opposite wall, leaving a mark still pointed out today.

Chelmsford, Essex

The site of the first witches convicted in a secular English court, in front of what’s now Shire Hall. Four pamphlets published between 1566 and 1589 documented the trials; Hopkins’s 1645 hunt alone saw around 29 of 65 accused hanged at Primrose Hill. Elizabeth Lowys, the ‘Great Waltham witch,’ was convicted of bewitching a baby to death in 1564 and hanged in 1565. The gallows site is now residential, and the Chelmsford Museum’s small witch exhibit is the only physical reminder left.

Agnes Waterhouse ‘Mother Waterhouse’ was the first woman executed for witchcraft in England, tried at Chelmsford in 1566 for allegedly causing illness and death, including a neighbour’s murder, and for owning a demonic familiar, a cat named Satan. She was hanged after admitting to owning the familiar despite claiming to have repented.

St Nicholas Church, Canewdon

This 14th-century parish church is bound up in local legend involving witches, the devil and ghosts tradition holds that walking around it seven times on Halloween will summon a witch, and that six witches will always live in the village while the church tower stands. George Pickingill (1816–1909), said to have led a hereditary witches’ coven and founded nine others, is buried here.

Witches of St Osyth

In 1582, fourteen women from St Osyth were tried at Chelmsford. Ursula Kempe, a midwife struggling to make a living, was accused after a client’s daughter died in a fall suspicion of witchcraft followed almost automatically. Skeletons later found in the area, bound with iron rivets through the knees and elbows in the manner historians believe witches were buried, are thought to include Ursula’s; her remains were finally laid to rest in a joint Pagan and Christian ceremony.

Long Meg and Her Daughters, Cumbria

This stone circle takes its name from a local 1600s witch, Meg. Legend holds that if you walk the circle counting the stones correctly, then put your ear to the largest Long Meg you’ll hear her whisper.

The Bideford Witch Trial Devon’s Last Witch Trial

Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards and Mary Trembles the ‘Bideford Three’ were arrested in August 1682 on accusations amounting to little more than gossip, tried in Exeter on 14 August, and hanged eleven days later. Lloyd confessed to causing several deaths through witchcraft; the other two were accused of causing sickness. Alice Molland was separately sentenced to death for witchcraft in Exeter in 1685 long considered England’s last witchcraft execution, though 2024 research suggests she may in fact have survived.

A mural in Musgrave Row, Exeter, depicts the Bideford Three, and a memorial plaque on the ruined gatehouse of Rougemont Castle reads: “The Devon Witches. In memory of Temperance Lloyd, Susannah Edwards, Mary Trembles, of Bideford, died 1682, Alice Molland, died 1685, the last people in England to be executed for witchcraft, tried here & hanged at Heavitree. In the hope of an end to persecution and intolerance.”

Famous Witches in Scotland

The North Berwick Witch Trials

The North Berwick trials were among the most brutal in Scottish history, sparked when King James VI, sailing to fetch his bride Anne of Denmark, was turned back by violent storms and became convinced witches were conspiring against his marriage. Somewhere between 70 and 200 people were tried, tortured and executed in the purge that followed, centred on St Andrew’s Kirk on the North Berwick seafront, where the accused were said to have held their covens. The ruins can still be visited at 27 Victoria Rd, North Berwick.

Gilly Duncan and Agnes Sampson

The purge began in 1590 when servant Gilly Duncan was arrested and, after torture, named accomplices among them Agnes Sampson, a respected midwife and healer personally examined by King James at Holyrood. Tortured and deprived of sleep, Sampson eventually confessed to 53 charges and was strangled and burned. Duncan was also convicted and burned on Castle Hill, and is one of 300 victims commemorated at Edinburgh’s Witches’ Well.

The Witches’ Well, Edinburgh

A monument to the estimated 300 women accused and burned during Scotland’s witch trials, at the top of the Royal Mile opposite Edinburgh Castle’s entrance, on the west wall of the Tartan Weaving Mill easy to miss, but worth the detour.

Isabella Billington

Isabella Billington was hanged for witchcraft in York in 1649, convicted of crucifying her own mother in what was recorded as a satanic ritual and of offering a calf and a cockerel as burnt sacrifice.

Scotland’s Apology and Why There’s Still No Pardon

Lawyer Claire Mitchell KC led the Witches of Scotland campaign for a formal legal pardon of the roughly 2,500 people convicted under the Witchcraft Act 1563. On International Women’s Day, 8 March 2022, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology on behalf of the Scottish Government to those accused, convicted and executed a significant, and rare, official reckoning with this history.

What actually happened next: SNP MSP Natalie Don introduced a Member’s Bill to turn that apology into a legal pardon. Public consultation ran through September 2022, with 82% of over 1,400 respondents supporting it. But the Bill was formally withdrawn in April 2023, when Don was appointed a government minister under Scottish parliamentary rules, ministers cannot promote member’s bills. The Scottish Government has since confirmed it has “no plans to legislate in this area.” The apology stands; the legal pardon does not.

Whatever comes next legally, the campaign’s own framing is worth sitting with: campaigners describe the witch hunts as a fundamentally gendered form of persecution, and argue that acknowledging it matters not only as history, but because witch accusations, torture and killings continue today in parts of the world a reminder that the underlying dynamic these trials reveal didn’t end with the last hanging.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many witch trials were there in the UK?

It varied hugely by nation. In England, 513 people were put on trial for witchcraft between 1560 and 1700, but only around 112 were actually executed. Scotland saw far more: an estimated 3,837 people accused between 1563 and 1736, with around 2,500 convicted and roughly 1,500 to 2,500 executed. Wales, by contrast, executed only five people for witchcraft in the entire period.

How many witches were killed in England?

Around 112 people were executed for witchcraft in England, almost all by hanging burning at the stake was a Scottish practice, not an English one.

When was the last witch trial in England?

The last known execution took place in Devon in 1685 (Alice Molland though recent research suggests she may have survived). The final trial was held in Leicester in 1717, where the accused was found not guilty.

Which region of England had the most witchcraft accusations?

East Anglia Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and Essex saw the highest concentration of accusations, driven largely by self-appointed Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins between 1645 and 1647.

What was the swimming test used on accused witches?

The swimming test, or ‘ducking,’ involved binding the accused and lowering them into water. Floating was taken as a sign of guilt, since water was believed to reject the guilty; sinking was taken as innocence though this meant an innocent person risked drowning to prove it.

Were witch trial victims mostly women?

Yes around 90% of those executed across Britain were women, disproportionately older, poor, widowed, or working as healers and midwives. Modern campaigners describe the trials as a fundamentally gendered form of persecution rooted in the same misogyny still visible in different forms today.

Has Scotland pardoned people convicted of witchcraft?

Not legally. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal apology on 8 March 2022, but the Member’s Bill proposing a legal pardon was withdrawn in April 2023, and the Scottish Government has since confirmed it has no plans to legislate for a pardon. The apology stands; the pardon does not.

Why were midwives and healers often accused of witchcraft?

Women who worked as midwives, herbalists and healers held knowledge and community standing that unsettled the increasingly male-dominated medical and religious establishment. When a birth, cure or harvest went wrong, that same knowledge made them easy to blame.

Visiting the witch trial sites of the UK offers a genuinely unique window into the country’s eerie past, where superstition, fear and as the historical record makes clear deep-rooted misogyny once combined to devastating effect. From Pendle Hill’s haunting moorland to the preserved history of Chelmsford and the Witches’ Well in Edinburgh, these locations are a powerful, sobering reminder of what unchecked hysteria can do and, per the campaigners still pushing for a legal pardon in Scotland, a history that isn’t as safely finished as it might feel.

If you are interested in reading more about Women and their history in Europe here are a few articles:

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A Haunting history of Witch trials in England

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