Witch Wood

Witch Wood tells the story of a high-minded, ardent and scholarly young Presbyterian minister, David Sempill, who is called to a benighted Tweeddale parish in 1645 at the time of the War of Three Kingdoms, and how his desire to root out covert witchcraft amongst some of his most ‘devout’ parishioners at a time of civil war and plague leads to tragedy and exile. The Marquis of Montrose, on whose biography John Buchan was working at the same time, has a walk-on part in the story. John Buchan considered this his best work of fiction, and I agree.

Often seen as the finest of the great thriller writer’s more serious historical novels. Buchan, like his hero Walter Scott, was of the Borders and deeply immersed in its history. Fortunately, he took Stevenson rather than Scott as his literary influence, and wrote atmospheric, vivid, and pithy prose, with a great sense of the land, the speech, the mindset, all shaped into strong narrative. The conflicting urges between decency and the psychotic, kindness and wickedness, rationality and wild superstition – which Stevenson himself displayed in The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde – run right through this book… show more.