The Witch Trials of Ireland: Islandmagee and Beyond
Between 1450 and 1750, an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft across Europe. Scotland, with a fraction of England's population, burned or hanged roughly 1,500 accused witches. Germany saw mass trials that wiped out entire villages. Ireland, by contrast, can claim perhaps four or five formal witch trials in its entire recorded history, and not a single judicial execution for the crime.
This is not because the Irish were uniquely enlightened. The reasons are more complicated — rooted in legal tradition, social structure, and the particular nature of English rule in Ireland. But the result is striking: when you walk the headlands of Islandmagee in County Antrim, you are visiting the site of the closest thing Ireland ever produced to a mass witch trial. Eight women were convicted there in 1711, pilloried, and imprisoned. No one died at the stake. Compared to what happened across the Irish Sea, that counts as restraint.
In Pagan Ireland: A Guide to Ancient Sites, Celtic Rituals and Sacred Landscapes, we explore how pre-Christian belief systems shaped Irish culture. Here, we examine a darker chapter: how Ireland confronted the European witch craze, and why it largely passed the country by.
The Islandmagee Trial of 1711
Islandmagee is a peninsula on the east coast of County Antrim, jutting into the North Channel between Larne and Carrickfergus. In the early 18th century, it was a Presbyterian settlement, populated largely by Scottish migrants who had crossed the narrow sea in the previous decades. They brought with them their religion, their dialect, and their beliefs about witchcraft.
The trouble began with a young woman named Mary Dunbar. In February 1711, Dunbar began to display symptoms that her community recognised as demonic possession: convulsions, trances, vomiting of foreign objects, and the ability to quote Scripture despite limited education. Under questioning, she named eight local women as her tormentors. The accused were Janet Latimer, Janet Main, Janet Millar, Janet Liston, Elizabeth Sellor, Bessie Brockwell, and two women whose surnames were recorded only as Martha and Catherine.
The trial took place at the assizes in Carrickfergus in March 1711. The legal framework was English common law, imported and imposed on Ireland, but the cultural context was unmistakably Scottish. Presbyterian minister Rev. James Skeen testified to the reality of the possession. A pamphlet published shortly after the trial — one of the few surviving contemporary sources — described the evidence in lurid detail: pins pulled from Dunbar's flesh, her accusations delivered in altered voices, the women's alleged confessions.
All eight were found guilty. Their punishment was not execution — hanging for witchcraft remained on the English statute books, but the Irish courts proved reluctant to apply it. Instead, the women were sentenced to a year in prison and public pillorying, during which they were made to wear signs describing their supposed crimes. For women in a small, tight-knit Presbyterian community, this was social death. The material consequences — loss of reputation, livelihood, and community standing — were devastating even without the gallows.
The trial is significant not for its severity but for its rarity. It is the only documented case in Irish history where multiple accused witches were convicted simultaneously. And even here, the judicial violence was limited compared to what would have happened in Scotland, where accused witches were routinely strangled and burned.
Alice Kyteler and the Medieval Precedent
The Islandmagee trial was not the first accusation of witchcraft in Ireland. That distinction belongs to Alice Kyteler, a wealthy Kilkenny woman accused in 1324 by Richard de Ledrede, the Franciscan Bishop of Ossory. Kyteler was charged with heresy, sorcery, and consorting with a demon lover. She escaped to England before she could be tried, but her servant, Petronilla de Meath, was tortured, confessed, and burned at the stake — the only confirmed execution for witchcraft in medieval Ireland.
The Kyteler case differs fundamentally from the Islandmagee trial three centuries later. Kyteler was accused by a bishop operating within canon law, targeting a wealthy woman in an ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The 1711 trial was a secular case rooted in popular belief, prosecuted under English common law in a community where Scottish Presbyterian culture dominated. The connection between the two is not direct continuity but rather the persistence of witchcraft belief across different legal, cultural, and religious frameworks in Irish history.
The The True Story of Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny (The Dark History Guide) article covers the Kyteler case in depth. What matters here is that between 1324 and 1711 — nearly four centuries — there is almost no documentary record of witchcraft prosecution in Ireland. This gap is extraordinary by European standards and demands explanation.
Why Ireland Escaped the Witch Craze
Several factors combined to insulate Ireland from the witch-hunting hysteria that swept continental Europe, Scotland, and parts of England.
First, the native Irish legal tradition — the Brehon laws — did not recognise witchcraft as a capital offence. The Brehon system was kinship-based, restorative rather than punitive, and focused on compensation rather than execution. When English common law was extended to Ireland from the 16th century onward, it supplanted the Brehon system in theory but not entirely in practice. Local juries in Gaelic areas often proved reluctant to convict neighbours of crimes they did not culturally recognise.
Second, Irish Catholicism developed differently from its continental counterpart. The Counter-Reformation in Ireland was primarily concerned with survival and resistance to Protestant plantation, not with internal religious purification. The Irish church lacked the institutional machinery — widespread inquisitorial courts, trained witch-finders, compliant secular authorities — that made mass witch trials possible in Germany, France, and Switzerland.
Third, the social structure of Gaelic Ireland made witchcraft accusations difficult. In tightly knit kinship networks, accusing a neighbour of witchcraft meant attacking your own extended family. The individualistic, atomised communities of Protestant Europe, where neighbours were strangers and suspicion flourished, were far more fertile ground for accusation.
Finally, England's colonial administration in Ireland was primarily concerned with political control and land confiscation, not with moral policing. The English authorities who governed Ireland were far more interested in suppressing rebellion than in hunting witches. Where witch trials did occur — at Islandmagee, and a handful of isolated cases in Ulster — they happened in Scottish Presbyterian communities that replicated the cultural conditions of Lowland Scotland.
Scotland, not England or Ireland, provides the real comparison. Scotland executed roughly five times as many witches per capita as England. The difference was the Scottish Kirk's enthusiastic involvement in witch prosecution, combined with a legal system that permitted torture and accepted spectral evidence. The Scottish migrants to Islandmagee brought these attitudes with them. When Mary Dunbar accused her neighbours, she was acting out a script written in Fife and Aberdeenshire.
Legacy and Memory
For three centuries, the Islandmagee trial was largely forgotten outside local memory. The eight women were not commemorated; no plaque marked their punishment. The story survived in Presbyterian church records, in the pamphlet literature of the period, and in the oral tradition of a peninsula that remained culturally Scottish well into the 20th century.
That changed in 2012, when a plaque was unveiled at Carnspindal, near the site of the trial, naming the eight women and acknowledging the injustice done to them. The plaque was the result of local historical research and campaigning, and it represents a shift in how Ireland confronts its darker historical episodes. There has been no formal pardon — the Irish state has never issued a general pardon for convicted witches, unlike Scotland, which posthumously pardoned its accused in 2022. But the plaque marks a beginning.
The memorial also raises uncomfortable questions. Why did Ireland produce so few witch trials, and why has it taken so long to acknowledge the ones that did happen? The answer may lie in the country's binary historical narrative: Catholic versus Protestant, coloniser versus colonised, nationalist versus unionist. The Islandmagee women do not fit neatly into any of these categories. They were Presbyterian, Scottish-descended, and living in a community that modern Irish identity has often struggled to integrate into its historical self-image.
For visitors to Islandmagee today, the peninsula offers dramatic coastal walks, seabird colonies, and views across the North Channel to Scotland. The witch trial site is unmarked except for the plaque. There is no visitor centre, no audio guide, no curated heritage trail. The landscape itself is the memorial — the same wind, the same stone, the same narrow fields that the accused women walked before their lives were destroyed by a teenager's testimony and a community's fear.
Why You Need a Local Guide for Ulster's Hidden History
Islandmagee is not on the standard tourist route through Northern Ireland. Most visitors to County Antrim head straight for the Giant's Causeway, the Carrick-a-Rede rope bridge, or the Dark Hedges, bypassing the peninsula entirely. The witch trial plaque is easy to miss, located on a minor road with no signage from the main routes.
A cultural tour guide for Northern Ireland can place the Islandmagee trial in its proper context: the Scottish migration to Ulster, the particular character of Irish Presbyterianism, the legal differences between Ireland and Scotland that spared these women's lives while ruining them in other ways. Without that context, the plaque is just a curious historical footnote. With it, the site becomes a window into one of the most puzzling questions in Irish history: why this country, with all its religious intensity, largely refused to burn its neighbours as witches.
Frequently Asked Questions
Meet a Local Guide
Hello.
How many witch trials happened in Ireland?
Historians generally identify four or five formal witch trials in Irish history: Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny (1324), the Islandmagee trial (1711), and a handful of isolated cases in Ulster in the 17th and 18th centuries. By comparison, Scotland executed roughly 1,500 accused witches and tried many more. Ireland's total is extraordinarily low by European standards.
What happened to the Islandmagee witches?
All eight women were found guilty at the Carrickfergus assizes in March 1711. They were sentenced to one year's imprisonment and public pillorying, during which they wore signs describing their supposed crimes. None were executed. Their fates after serving their sentences are not recorded.
Why did Ireland have fewer witch trials than Scotland?
Multiple factors: the native Brehon law tradition did not recognise witchcraft as a capital crime; Irish Catholicism lacked the institutional machinery for mass prosecution; Gaelic kinship networks made neighbourly accusation socially difficult; and English colonial authorities were more concerned with political control than moral policing. The trials that did happen occurred mainly in Scottish Presbyterian communities in Ulster.
Is there a memorial to the Islandmagee witches?
A plaque commemorating the eight women was unveiled at Carnspindal, Islandmagee, in 2012. It names the accused and acknowledges the injustice done to them. There is no visitor centre or formal heritage site. Unlike Scotland, which issued a posthumous pardon to accused witches in 2022, Ireland has not formally pardoned the Islandmagee women.
Conclusion
The witch trials of Ireland represent both a dark chapter and an unusual one. The Islandmagee case reminds us that Irish history contains violence and injustice alongside the better-known narratives of resistance and survival. At the same time, the near-absence of witch trials from the Irish record raises profound questions about how legal systems, social structures, and religious institutions shape — or suppress — collective hysteria.
For those interested in Ireland's broader supernatural history, Beaghmore Stone Circles: Tyrone's Forgotten Ritual Landscape explores a Bronze Age site whose purpose remains unexplained — a reminder that much of Ireland's pagan past resists easy interpretation. The Cailleach and Ireland's Winter Goddesses examines the female divine figures who, in a different cultural framework, might have been the precursors to the women accused at Islandmagee.
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