INTRODUCTION

This case came to the attention of the authorities in April 1590 when James Kinnaird and his wife Janet Henderson, in Auchlinsky in the parish of Glendevon, southern Perthshire, were discovered to have some magical objects: nine grains of wheat, a piece of rowan tree, and the joint of a man's finger. This information may have emerged during a commissioner's visitation of the presbytery or diocese. The presbytery of Stirling summoned Kinnaird, who testified that the objects belonged to Isobel Watson. Possibly she had provided them to help Kinnaird's wife in childbirth. Kinnaird brought Watson with him to the presbytery, whose attention was immediately focused on her.

Watson said that she was aged about sixty. She seems to have grown up in Muthill and spent her young adulthood in Perth. Her husband, a fisherman, had died three years after the Reformation, thus in about 1563, and since then she had begged for a living, mainly in the Glendevon area.2 She was a magical practitioner and apparently a midwife, healing people and finding lost and stolen goods. What particularly attracted the presbytery's attention, however, was Watson's account of her visions of fairies and visits to fairyland – visions that, she said, she had experienced since the age of eighteen.

These visions included some extraordinary folkloric detail, making this case one of Scotland's most valuable sources of material for fairy belief. Perceptive discussions of it have been published by Michael F. Graham and P. G. Maxwell-Stuart.3 Just a few points may be picked out here.