The Trows of Eshaness

Eshaness, Northmavine, Shetland, Scotland

A woman burned as a witch in 17th-century Shetland testified under oath that she had seen trows rising from a churchyard at Hildiswick — one of the earliest written records of trow-sighting anywhere in the islands.

Eshaness, on the wild northwestern tip of Shetland's mainland, is a landscape of black volcanic cliffs and blowholes, formed by an ancient volcano and shaped since by the constant battering of the North Atlantic. It sits within Northmavine, an area whose Shetland folklore is dense with trows — the small, malignant or mischievous fairy-folk of Orkney and Shetland tradition, said to live in the peatland hills and come out at night to work mischief among humans. The earliest substantial written record of trow-belief from this specific area comes not from a folklore collector but from a courtroom. In the early 17th century, a woman named Katherine Johnsdaughter was tried and burned as a witch in Shetland. Her surviving testimony, preserved in the Court Book of Shetland covering 1615 to 1629, describes her seeing "trollis" — trows — rising from the kirkyard of Hildiswick and the Holy Cross Kirk of Eshaness, and again on a nearby hill called Greinfaill, drawn to houses where there was feasting or "great mirrines," particularly around Yule. Katherine's testimony is treated by folklorists as one of the earliest datable, named accounts of trow-belief anywhere in Shetland — not a story collected generations after the fact, but a statement given under judicial oath by a woman whose own life depended on it. The area around nearby Petta Water is still described in local tradition as unusually rich in trow activity, a reputation that, on this stretch of coast, has documentary roots stretching back four centuries.