Heal & Harrow

At a time when there is a movement afoot to pardon the 4,000 or so women who found themselves at the wrong end of Scotland’s witch trials between the 16th and 18th century – the last execution under the 1563 Witchcraft Act was of Janet Horne, a poor, aged woman with a disabled daughter, in 1727 – this pairing of harpist Rachel Newton and fiddler Lauren MacColl is quietly beautiful in its music, and with a clipped anger to its lyrics. It opens with the sharp, keening sound of MacColl’s fiddle, the lilting rhythms of Newton’s harp, and the story of Lilias Adie, accused by a neighbour of witchcraft, and who died before her trial. Her body, buried under a stone slab on Torryburn Bay, was disturbed by curio hunters and later lost. Just one extra degradation.

There are songs here for Isobel Gowdie, whose famous confessions point to a genuine shamanistic vision tradition as much as the murderous misogyny of the witchfinders. These included one Christian Caldwell, a cross-dressing ‘witch-pricker’ who has his/her own song in ‘Judge Not’. Songs touch on the survival of magical beliefs, too, as well as highlighting the parallels with violence against women today. The apt word for this set has to be ‘spellbinding.’