It takes some effort, standing in the manicured lawns and flowerbeds of Princes Street Gardens today, to picture the site as anything other than the pleasant civic green space it has been for the better part of two centuries. Before that, though, the valley held the Nor' Loch, an artificial body of water created in the fifteenth century to strengthen the Old Town's northern defences, which by the seventeenth century had degraded into something closer to an open sewer and dumping ground — and, more darkly, a working site for the trial and execution of suspected witches.
Scotland's use of water-based "swimming" tests to identify witches (the belief that a true witch would float rather than sink) is less securely documented than the popular imagination sometimes assumes, and wasn't the primary method used in most Scottish witchcraft trials generally. Local tradition and some historical accounts nonetheless place a substantial number of Edinburgh's witch trials at or around the Nor' Loch specifically, with an estimated 300 men and women tried for witchcraft or wizardry in or near its waters over the period. The scale could be severe: on one single day in 1624, eleven women were drowned there. Execution by drowning was formally outlawed in Scotland in 1685, bringing that particular chapter of the loch's history to an end, though the loch itself continued to serve as a dumping ground and suicide site for some time afterwards.
The loch's slow drainage began in the 1760s as part of the ambitious New Town development taking shape on the far side of the valley, and by the nineteenth century the space was being reworked into ornamental gardens. That transformation produced one of the more startling archaeological finds connected to the loch's history: in the spring of 1820, workmen digging a drain as part of the gardens' creation uncovered a box, buried deep in the old loch-bed mud, containing the remains of three people — a discovery that, whatever its exact explanation, serves as a physical reminder of exactly what lay beneath Edinburgh's most celebrated public garden.
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