Online Talk: Scottish Peasants in the Magical Landscape

Date 22 September 2026 19:00 - 20:30

Location Online talk

Speaker Julian Goodare

Scottish Peasants in the Magical Landscape

A Folklore Society Online talk by

Julian Goodare

Tues 22 September, 19:00 BST

The common folk experienced the pre-modern Scottish landscape as benevolent and dangerous, negotiating with it in rituals and traditions. They looked at the landscape as farmers, seeing their own productive fields, plus pastures, hills and waters. This landscape was benevolent, but it contained dangers, and even benevolent fertility was uncertain. Peasants thus carried out rituals to propitiate not only Christian beings but also nature spirits – particularly fairies – who symbolised the landscape as an active force. Rituals could involve ‘sunwise’ movement, or traversing boundaries, or using south-running water.

Some places were magical portals. At a green knoll or a lochside, one might be transported into a fairy otherworld, entering a different state of consciousness. For some people, this otherworld was direct visionary experience.

Much of my evidence comes from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century witchcraft trials. However, I am not concerned with witchcraft as such, but with the original meaning of rituals and visions before the prosecutors reinterpreted them.

Peasants also told stories about unusual landscape features. Landscape legends, recorded mainly in the nineteenth century, look very different from the earlier witchcraft trial evidence – but, I will argue, the two types of evidence can be brought into mutually profitable conversation. Landscape legends add a temporal dimension to the magical landscape.

Julian Goodare is Emeritus Professor of History, University of Edinburgh. His books include The European Witch-Hunt (2016) and Weird Sisters: Scottish Witches in the Literary Imagination (2026). He is Director of the online Survey of Scottish Witchcraft.

Tickets £6.00 (£4.00 for Folklore Society members with the Promo Code - log in to https://folklore-society.com/members-only to get the Promo Code) from https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/scottish-peasants-in-the-magical-landscape-tickets-1992159418448 

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php