The Great Scottish Witch Hunt of 1661-62 stands as one of the largest and most intense witch-hunting episodes in the country's entire history, a sixteen-month wave of accusation and trial beginning in April 1661 that, taken across Scotland as a whole, saw at least 660 people formally tried for witchcraft and various forms of diabolism — a scale that dwarfs even the better-known individual cases, like the North Berwick trials of the 1590s or the Paisley trials of 1697, that tend to dominate popular retellings of Scottish witch history.
In the districts of Niddrie and Liberton, south-east of the city and now thoroughly absorbed into Edinburgh's suburbs, that national wave found local expression through John Preston, who served as a commissioner on multiple witchcraft trials in the area during the hunt's two-year span. Commissioners in this system were typically local landowners or figures of standing granted authority by the Privy Council to investigate accusations, examine suspects (often including judicially sanctioned torture) and refer cases on toward trial and, in many instances, execution — a role that placed enormous practical power over life and death in the hands of men like Preston, working at the parish level far from the courts and chronicles that have preserved the names of Scotland's more famous individual accused witches.
The specific individuals tried under Preston's commission in Niddrie and Liberton are not identified by name in the sources consulted for this record, which is itself telling of how thoroughly this particular, locally devastating episode has been absorbed into the much larger, better-documented national story of 1661-62 — hundreds of individual local tragedies, each with its own now largely anonymous victims, folded into a single statistic. It is recorded here specifically to mark that this district, now unremarkable Edinburgh suburb, was itself a real and active site of that national panic, not merely adjacent to it.
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