Witch Wood

Witch Wood takes us to seventeenth-century Scotland, a place of hard winters, harder sermons and an alarming shortage of people prepared to mind their own business. The country is divided by religion, politics and the Civil War, while almost everybody is convinced that God agrees with them personally and has reserved a particularly unpleasant eternity for the people in the next parish.

Young David Sempill arrives as the new minister of Woodilee, a remote Border community whose inhabitants appear, at first glance, to be merely poor, suspicious and unusually enthusiastic about sin. David is earnest, compassionate and determined to serve his parishioners without shouting damnation at them every few minutes—an attitude which immediately marks him as dangerously unconventional. He soon discovers that beneath Woodilee’s public displays of rigid Presbyterian virtue lies a considerably older and less respectable world.

In the nearby Melanudrigill Wood, strange rites are being performed among the trees. Figures who spend Sunday condemning wickedness may be occupying their remaining evenings in rather more inventive pursuits, and David begins to suspect that witchcraft is not merely something discussed by excitable elders after too much ale. Unfortunately, accusing respectable parishioners of participating in pagan ceremonies is rarely an efficient way to improve one’s standing in the community, especially when some of those parishioners are better connected, more ruthless and considerably less troubled by conscience.

As plague and civil conflict close in, David must contend with hypocrisy, fanaticism, forbidden love and the uncomfortable possibility that the supposed guardians of righteousness are sheltering something thoroughly rotten. His struggle is not simply against witchcraft but against a society in which religious certainty provides excellent camouflage for cruelty, ambition and private appetite. Everyone talks constantly about the Devil, although very few seem willing to notice him when he is sitting on the kirk session.

First published in 1927, Witch Wood is one of John Buchan’s darker and more substantial historical novels: part supernatural mystery, part political drama and part portrait of a community busily polishing its public virtue while something unspeakable dances in the forest. Buchan fills it with brooding landscapes, theological quarrels, secret rituals and that peculiarly Scottish variety of menace in which even the weather appears to disapprove of you.

This 1989 Carroll & Graf edition is in Good condition—a sound and presentable copy which may have passed through mortal hands but shows no definite evidence of nocturnal ceremonies in a wood. Ideal for admirers of historical fiction, folk horror and novels about communities where the minister is the only person asking sensible questions, and everyone else would greatly prefer that he stopped.

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