“Rowan-tree and red thread
Gar the witches tyne their speed.”
Where such protection was neglected, to discover the witch, the gudeman’s breeks might be put upon the horns of the cow—a leg upon each horn—when, for certain, crummie being let loose, would run straight to the door of the guilty party.
When the late Reverend Dr. Andrew A. Bonar as a young man laboured in the position of assistant minister in Collace parish, less than half a century ago, I have been told, he found the practice of wearing horse-shoes on byre doors so prevalent there that he tried to reason the people out of the absurdity. He so far succeeded, but no further than this, that they took them off the outsides of the door and fastened them upon the insides—where, I believe, some are to be seen even to this day and hour.
“Scoring abune the breath” (executing with a rusty nail, to the effusion of blood, the sign of the Cross, on the upper parts of the face of a suspected witch) was another means of protection. Whoso performed this ceremony was henceforth secure against personal attack from the particular witch, or witches, he may have “scored.” An old joiner, or “wricht,” in a Perthshire village, with whom I was well acquainted in my boyhood, had a belief in witches which no human argument could dissolve. He suspected a neighbour’s wife of witchcraft, and lived in terror of her until, one day, finding a favourable opportunity of performing the operation, he “scored” her “abune the breath” with a rusty nail, which he carried with him concealed for the purpose; and, this done, he started back, and shaking his clenched fist in her face, bragged her to “do her warst noo.”
In Hogg’s tale of “The Witch of Fife,” is to be found the pleasantest stories of witches’ “ongauns” to be met with anywhere. Hogg had no peer in the delineation of the mysterious and uncanny, and the students of fairy mythology will ever esteem his picture of “Kilmeny,” as one of the most beautiful and perfect of its kind.
“Bonnie Kilmeny gaed up the glen,
But it wasna to meet Duneira’s men.”
Like many another, before and since, she was taken possession of by the fairies, and led to a land where