Maggie Wall's Monument

Justice Mill Lane, Aberdeen, Scotland

A 20-foot cairn near Dunning reads 'Maggie Wall Burnt Here 1657 as a Witch' — except no trial record for any Maggie Wall exists, and the monument itself likely wasn't built until the 1790s.

On a hillside near the village of Dunning in Perthshire stands a roughly twenty-foot cairn-like monument, topped with a cross, painted with the inscription: "Maggie Wall Burnt Here 1657 as a Witch." The monument is entirely real and has become a minor pilgrimage site for those interested in Scotland's witch-hunting history. The trial it commemorates is not. No public or court record of any woman named Maggie Wall exists anywhere in the surviving archive of Scottish witchcraft prosecutions, and analysis of the monument's construction — including traces suggesting the use of gunpowder in quarrying its stone, and its general building technique — indicates it was likely built no earlier than the 1790s, over a century after the date it commemorates, and the monument itself has no documented history before 1866. Dunning does have a genuine, documented connection to the witch trials of the period: in 1663, six women from the parish were formally accused of witchcraft, and three of them were executed. None of the six is recorded under the name Maggie Wall. The leading theory among local historians is that the monument may function as a general, composite memorial to Dunning's real witch trial victims rather than a marker for one specific, individually documented woman — a folly, or a symbolic gesture, built at some remove from the events it claims to mark, and now more visited and more photographed than any grave connected to the trials that actually happened.