The Wigtown Martyrs

Kelso, Roxburghshire, Scotland

Margaret Wilson, eighteen, and Margaret McLachlan, sixty-three, were staked to the tidal mudflats of Wigtown Bay in 1685 and left to drown for refusing to renounce their faith.

On the 11th of May, 1685, two women — Margaret Wilson, around eighteen years old, and Margaret McLachlan, around sixty-three — were executed in Wigtown, in Galloway, for refusing to swear the Oath of Supremacy acknowledging King James VII as head of the church, at the height of the persecution of the Covenanters known as the Killing Time. The two women were tied to stakes set into the tidal mudflats of the River Bladnoch, within Wigtown Bay, at a point calculated so that the rising tide would drown them slowly rather than by any faster method. Contemporary accounts, recorded by the minister and historian Robert Wodrow in his History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, describe Margaret Wilson reciting psalms aloud as the water rose around her, continuing until she could no longer be heard. The event has not gone entirely unchallenged by historians. In the nineteenth century, the historian Mark Napier argued that the drownings never took place as described, questioning the primary sources. His objections were rebutted at the time by the Reverend Archibald Stewart and have not persuaded the mainstream historical consensus — historians including Hume Brown and Andrew Lang accepted the executions as factual, and the balance of modern scholarship treats the Wigtown drownings as a real, documented event of the period rather than later Covenanting mythology. Wigtown still holds the Martyrs' Stake, marking the site in the mudflats, and a grave and memorial in the town itself — one of the most visited and best-preserved sites connected to the Covenanting persecutions anywhere in Scotland.