Witchwood

Witch Wood is a 1927 historical novel by the Scottish author John Buchan, set in the Scottish Borders during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Buchan wrote it while researching Montrose, his biography of James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, who appears in the novel as a minor character. Buchan's research had raised questions of seventeenth-century religious tolerance, which he wanted to explore. Drawing on elements of Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, the book combines Buchan's wider interests in landscape, 17th century Calvinism, and the history of Scotland. A substantial part of the dialogue is in Scots. The novel opens in 1644, with a newly-ordained minister of the Church of Scotland arriving in a rural parish in the Scottish Borders. Nominally loyal to the Covenanters, he befriends a Royalist (Cavalier) supporter James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose. In the Black Wood, the minister discovers a cult of Devil-worshippers who wear animal headpieces to maintain their secret identities. The minister tries to expose an enemy as a heretic, but his foe counterattacks by revealing that the minister was harbouring a fugitive and that he had a secret affair with a mysterious woman. The minister is found guilty, and he is excommunicated and ejected from his ministry. The excommunicated minister forces his foe to choose between worshipping Jesus and worshipping Satan, but the man flees in terror and is killed in an accidental fall. The minister supposedly disappears without a trace, but an epilogue reveals that the minister and his only remaining friend boarded the first available ship out of Scotland.