Travel north from the whisky islands of Islay and Jura, through the sheltered Crinan Canal, and you will eventually reach Knapdale. There, the land gets wilder, and locals would tell tales of witchcraft. Two centuries ago, a woman named Sarah of the Bog is said to have lived there. Her story is as fascinating as it is seasonally appropriate, for Sarah was a known witch.
She was a strong, tall, and solitary figure, with smoke always coming from her lum, as Scots still name chimneys. The local women were cautious around her. To ensure they weren’t caught up in her necromancy, they would offer peat, the free fuel that nevertheless required back-breaking hard work to dig up. This carried on for years, as excisemen roamed the coast and the bog to seek out smugglers who were known to pass through — but even they knew not to disturb a witch. However, one day, a different kind of smoke was seen from her ramshackle wee house. Brave neighbours entered and found Sarah’s blackened body smouldering — the witch had burnt to death. But this was no lynching or execution. Sarah of the Bog had indulged a bit too much in her own wares and fallen into her own fire. Rather than potions, spells, and sorcery, it turned out that Sarah’s copper pot of choice was in fact a still, on which she had been making illicit whisky. She was no witch, after all — simply a very canny distiller.
Alfred Barnard recounted this story in his famous Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom, published in 1887, which described his visits to 162 distilleries across the British and Irish Isles. His work is known to typify the dry 19th-century style of reporting extensive technical knowledge — but nuggets like the story of Sarah of the Bog offer tantalising insights to the communities he experienced, too.
Part of his entry for Oban, Sarah’s was apparently a commonly known story in the area. When Barnard allowed himself to go off track, to leave the increasingly industrial distilleries of the grand Victorian age behind him, hints of the wild past of Scotland emerge. Only a couple of generations earlier, illicit distilling had played a large part in the informal economy of the Highlands and Islands, and witchcraft was an ongoing concern to locals. For many communities of the west coast and western isles, the superstitions lived on far beyond the judicial pursuit of trying witches did, and the stories even longer still.
The idea of a woman gaining the title ‘of the bog’ isn’t unique to Barnard’s fable. Also published in the 1880s, John Monteath’s Dunblane Traditions tells a story of ‘Maggy o’ the Bog’. A chapter is dedicated to her legendary, unlicensed ‘howf’ — an old Scots word meaning a favourite haunt, typically a kind of pub or tavern. Located in the vague location of “six un-measured miles from Stirling”, Maggy’s howf welcomed locals and travellers alike.
Monteath’s description of the building itself doesn’t sound particularly cosy, but he assures readers that Maggy’s was a favourite thanks to the “genuine-ness of the Highland whisky”. Her son being a famous smuggler, that’s perhaps no surprise. Monteath doesn’t go as far as penning the word ‘witchcraft’, but the story has an air of the supernatural about it. Maggy is said to have lived an uncommonly long life, reaching 99 years old, with her building falling down after its owners’ demise and leaving no trace. There’s a sense of the ‘Otherworld’ of Celtic mythology about the story: time passes strangely and whisky always flows, before the unlikely place suddenly disappears back into the earth.
Tourism is a massive industry for Scotland today, but that’s no new development. Thomas Cook is often cited as the first provider of package holidays, with his inaugural bookable trip being to Scotland all the way back in the 1840s. These visitors weren’t coming for city visits or comforts, though. Tourists in the Victorian era wanted to experience the wild and wonderful, known to them through the works of Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, and set off to the wild north. Alongside tartan, oats and remote, awesome landscapes, whisky has long belonged to people’s imagined vision of that place.
Yet as the Victorian age developed and industrialisation strode on, Scotland became home to engineering and technological advancements, too. This led to a dichotomy between visitor expectations and reality, which locals began to be aware of and annoyed by. Search through archives and old newspapers, and numerous articles appear complaining about the caricatures expressed in travel writing and outdated expectations of visitors. Of course, considering the tartanry of whisky marketing, our beloved drink no doubt contributed to the longevity of these stereotypes.
We have to ask whether Sarah and Maggy were real whisky women living on their respective bogs. Did Sarah truly get away with distilling on the bog for decades, enabled by locals and utilising superstitions to keep the excisemen away? It would be great to think so. There’s something deeply empowering and entertaining about a woman actively taking the stereotypes of being a witch and using them to her advantage. Equally, it’s very possible that the locals of Knapdale were playing with Barnard. The opportunity to pass a long ferry ride by entertaining the whisky-loving English journalist with tall tales, simultaneously playing into and usurping clichés, would have been hard to resist. Perhaps Maggy’s otherworldly howf near Dunblane is more realistic, but it could just as well be a local take on the old myth of otherworldly fairies with never-ending drams.
While we may reject the idea that Scotland is overly superstitious, we do like to spin a good yarn. Ultimately, it’s up to the reader to decide if it matters. After all, everyone loves a spooky story at Halloween.
