ANDY Murray, in his article on Wigtown the book town (May 8), states that ''a witch was once famously tied to a stake in Wigtown Bay and drowned''.
The facts of the matter are that two women were executed by drowning in 1685 because they refused to acknowledge the authority of King Charles II as head of the compulsory Episcopal Church rule which the king was trying to impose on the Church in Scotland. Like many others who shared their principles and beliefs, the women fervently believed that Jesus Christ was the only Head of the Church. As a result they became victims of the ferocious and relentless persecution which the authorities inflicted on any and all who opposed them.
In these ''killing times'', many people all over Scotland, now remembered as the Covenanters, were tortured, killed, or transported to exile for their adherence to their beliefs. The oppressive measures fell particularly severely on Galloway in south-west Scotland, and the drowning of the ''Wigtown Martyrs'' was one of the worst of many detestable actions by the agents of the Government.
Following the end of the oppression there was great national revulsion at the killing of these women, and the authorities put in hand a deliberate campaign of disinformation to discredit the event as a fabricated story.
At first, this lie cut little ice in Galloway while first-hand contacts or eyewitnesses were still alive, but in later years local people, fearful that the truth would not survive, constructed on Windy Hill, the highest point in Wigtown, a permanent memorial to the truth of the event.
Unfortunately muck sticks, and even nowadays, in the academic ivory towers of excellence in at least two of our four main universities, my children have been taught that what happened in Wigtown was myth.
As a small boy growing up in Stirling half a century ago, I can recall looking down from the castle esplanade overlooking the national Covenanter memorial, and seeing for the first time the beautiful (and then unvandalised) brilliant white statue of two women sculpted to commemorate the martyrdom in Wigtown. I was told that to such brave people, Scotland owed its much-prized freedom of worship, speech, and opinion.
I did not know then that I would spend nearly 40 years living among the people of Wigtownshire, and that I would meet, still living in the area today, the direct descendants of the martyrs' families. Local tradition is strong and the truth is documented in parish and town records. Even after 300 years, the descendants of the transported occasionally turn up from abroad, bearing carefully preserved and handed down family stories about the persecution and resulting exile of the time.
This atrocity was part of Galloway's holocaust and it had nothing whatsoever to do with witchcraft. The state of the memorial in Stirling is a civic disgrace to the town and an eyesore to tourists. It should be renovated as a thing of beauty to become part of our Scottish national heritage.
Since her article is now topical in relation to the book-town launch, you might like to reprint your Saturday, June 14, 1997 contribution by Elizabeth Robertson who wrote an excellent and comprehensive account of what actually happened here.
Dr M F Brewster,
''Dunure'', Wigtown. May 9.
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