Thornyhold

Thornyhold is a fantasy novel by the English writer Mary Stewart, published in 1988. It is told by a woman who inherits a house, a garden and a reputation she did not earn.

Geillis Ramsey, known as Gilly, grows up in isolation. The one adult who takes an interest in her is her mother's cousin, who is also called Geillis and who teaches the child to look at the world through her own unusual eyes.

When that cousin dies, Gilly inherits her house in the country and the place she held in the local community as a white witch and an herbalist. The neighbourhood turns out to be no ordinary village, and trouble soon appears in the form of magic directed at Christopher Dryden, a widowed writer who lives in rural isolation with his young son. Dryden points out to Gilly that her name belonged to a real woman tried for witchcraft in Edinburgh in the sixteenth century, and the novel works out what the inheritance actually means. The house and the garden are the centre of the book, and what Gilly has been given includes the knowledge her cousin left behind.