Witch Wood

Witch Wood is a historical novel by the Scottish writer John Buchan, published in 1927. It is set in the Scottish Borders during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and a good deal of its dialogue is in Scots. It was the author's own favourite among his novels.

The story begins in 1644 with the arrival of David Sempill, newly ordained, at the parish of Woodilee. He is a moderate Presbyterian, and the parish he has been given is divided between the Covenanters who hold to the hard line of the Kirk and the older practices that have not gone away; it is in the wood near the village that he discovers what some of his parishioners are doing.

His attempts to deal with it set the parish against him. Buchan wrote the novel while he was researching a biography of the Marquess of Montrose, who appears in it as a minor character, and he drew on the idea, then current among historians, that the witchcraft of the period was the survival of an older religion.