Witch Wood is a 1927 historical novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, set in 1644, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

The story is written as a third-person narrative. In the prologue, the unnamed narrator muses on the rural parish of Woodilee in the Scottish Borders. Looking at its now-ruined parish kirk, he recalls a legend about its last minister, who had disappeared without trace three hundred years earlier. Locals believe that he was spirited away by the fairies, or by the Devil.

Witch Wood brings together many of Buchan’s interests: landscape, 17th-century Calvinism and the fate of Scotland.^[1]

Background

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Witch Wood was written while Buchan was researching Montrose, the revised version of his biography of James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, who appears as a minor character in the novel. His research had raised questions of religious tolerance which he wanted to explore. The story was originally known as The Minister of Woodilee, and was first serialised in British Weekly under the title The High Places.^[2] According to the historian Ronald Hutton, it draws on ideas based on the Witch-cult hypothesis of the anthropologist Margaret Murray.^[3]

Synopsis

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The story opens in 1644 with the arrival of the young and newly ordained Church of Scotland minister David Sempill in the parish of Woodilee. The parish is firmly in support of the Covenanters in their dispute with the monarch over the limits of royal authority over how the Church is run. Although a Covenanter himself, Sempill helps a wounded follower of the king, Mark Kerr, by hiding him in the manse.

The manse is close to the Wood of Caledon, which some call the Black Wood. One night, while walking home through the wood, Sempill stumbles upon a circle of his parishioners wearing animal headpieces, and performing ceremonies around a pagan altar. He attempts to intervene, but is attacked, and wakes up back in the manse, badly beaten.

With the help of a local farmer, Reiverslaw, Sempill learns that the next pagan ceremony is to be held on Lammas Eve, and they form a plan to identify the ringleader by splashing him with a pungent aniseed oil that will stick to his clothing. The following day, the wife of a prominent elder of the Kirk, Ephraim Caird, is discovered burning clothes on a fire, which smells strongly of aniseed.

The plague comes to Woodilee. Sempill works to prevent its spread helped by a newcomer named Mark Riddel who, unknown to the locals, is the fugitive Mark Kerr. Nursing care is surreptitiously provided by a shadowy figure whom the locals take to be a fairy, but who is in fact Katrine Yester, niece of the local laird, to whom Sempill is secretly engaged. Katrine contracts the plague and dies.

Sempill presents his evidence of Ephraim Caird’s heresy to the Presbytery, the Kirk’s religious court, which rejects it as circumstantial and unreliable. In retaliation, Caird brings counter-charges against the minister for harbouring a fugitive, for associating with Mark Riddel (now publicly identified as Mark Kerr), and for keeping the company of an unknown woman. Sempill is found guilty and is excommunicated and ejected from his ministry.

On his way back from the hearing, Sempill meets Ephraim Caird near the Black Wood. He forces him to kneel before the pagan altar, and to make his choice between Christ and the Devil. The effort is too much for Caird, who runs off in demented terror and is killed in a fall. Sempill is never seen again.

In the epilogue, it is revealed that Sempill and Kerr had ridden to Leith and boarded the first available ship out of Scotland.

Critical reception

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Early critics were quick to recognise the significance of the novel, which has since come to be widely regarded as Buchan’s masterpiece. The Spectator called it a “powerful, charming and spiritually earnest novel which almost enables Mr Buchan to be called a modern and terse Walter Scott”, and the Glasgow Herald thought that it “must be adjudged the greatest of Mr Buchan’s published works. That it concerns the land and history of Scotland, that it makes brilliant use of braid Scots dialect and that it enshrines many aspects, both admirable and contemptible, of the Scottish character are features that must give satisfaction to Mr Buchan’s countrymen”.^[4]

External links

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• Witch Wood, from the Saturday Night Play Theatre