Kirkcaldy drama group to stage play on the final days of a tortured Fife 'witch'

The Auld Kirk Players will perform the play, in the town’s Hunter Hall, which has been written and directed by Graeme Ferguson.

It will tell the story of the final days of Lilias Adie from Torryburn (1640-1704).

In the summer of 1704 she was summoned before a court, having been accused of witchcraft by her neighbour, Jean Bisset, who believed she was working with the devil and was sending Satan to kill both Mrs Bisset and her daughter.

After days of being tortured, Lilias died in prison but her guilt not proven.

Like many others accused of witchcraft, her body was still burned. The villagers buried her remains in the intertidal zone of the River Forth – un-consecrated ground. To prevent her coming back to haunt the village they placed a large stone slab on top of her coffin.

Around 150 years after her death in 1852, her remains were unearthed and eventually found their way to the University of St Andrews where her skull was photographed, before disappearing completely.

In 2017 the picture was used by Dundee University forensic artist Christopher Rynn to produce a likeness of her using state-of-the-art 3D sculpture

The last sighting seems to have been of her skull at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938.

Graeme’s account is based upon the official Torryburn Kirk session minutes of June to September 1704.The names of the villagers involved have not been changed and the stone slab used to trap her body in the mud can still be seen at low tide.

The play will be performed by the Auld Kirk Players in Hunter Hall, Kirkcaldy on May 14 and 15 before being performed in the Carnegie Hall, Dunfermline on May 23 during the Remembering Witches Accused conference week.

The Remembering Witches conference aims to have a memorial erected to all the women treated as witches and burned at the stake during that infamous period between 1563 and 1736.