Ashes & Stones: A Scottish Journey in Search of Witches & Witness
The book I read in the category Published in 2023 for the 2023 NONFICTION READER CHALLENGE is Ashes & Stones: A Scottish Journey in Search of Witches & Witness by Allyson Shaw, 2023. Allyson Shaw is an American of Scottish background who moved to the north of Scotland 15 years before writing this book, which seeks to find out more about the witch-hunts in Scotland. She spent a few years “visiting monuments to accused witches – the stones, fountains and even hedge mazes dedicated to people who were accused during the witch-hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Secreted away outside a village here, beside a suburban lawn there, each has its own story.” Each chapter of the book focuses on one of those stories. The witch-hunts in Scotland lasted for almost 200 years, with approximately 4,000 people officially accused and over 2,000 executed. As Shaw writes, “Considering the small population of Scotland in the seventeenth century (approximately 800,000 people), the