The Fife Witches Trail is a series of three plaques located along the Fife Coastal Path in the west of the Kingdom, commemorating the women executed as witches there in the 16th to 18th centuries.
For almost two centuries, Scotland was in the grip of a dangerous epidemic. Not the plague or a swarm of locusts, but a crippling fear of sorcery and black magic. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, frenzied witch hunts were taking place across the country, searching for people believed to be causing disasters such as shipwrecks, blights and disease. Fife might be a small county, but it carried out some of the fiercest witch hunts. Fishing communities were already deeply superstitious, so it’s no surprise that those on the Fife coast paid a higher price than most. The majority of those accused were female, many of them elderly and widowed. They were easy targets for the authorities, people already on the fringes of society and without the power to defend themselves.
There were dozens of witch trials in Fife, but the most famous case is undoubtedly Lilias Adie – The Torryburn Witch. One of the plaques is located close to her watery grave in the village of Torryburn, the other two are at at Valleyfield Wood and Culross just along the coast.
The plaques which were created by Differentia are located in the villages of Culross, Valleyfield and Torryburn.
