Witches of Scotland - EPISODE 71 - THE SURVEY OF SCOTTISH WITCHCRAFT WITH PROG GOODARE, EUAN MCANDREW & RUBY IMRIE

00:00:00.960 I am Clare Mitchell, Doctor of Laws and King's Council.

00:00:04.080 And I am Zoe Vendetotsi, Doctor of Laws, Teacher and Writer.

00:00:07.760 On the 8th of March 2020, International Women's Day,

00:00:11.120 we launched the Feminist Witches of Scotland campaign.

00:00:13.920 The Witchcraft Act, enforced between 1563 and 1736,

00:00:19.360 saw thousands of people, mostly women,

00:00:22.080 accused and executed as witches in Scotland

00:00:25.040 in the country's biggest and most brutal miscarriage of justice.

00:00:28.880 Our campaign had three aims. To get a formal state apology for those accused of witchcraft,

00:00:34.640 to obtain a pardon for all those convicted and to get a national memorial to remember

00:00:39.360 those involved in the Witchcraft Act. On International Women's Day 2022, the first

00:00:45.040 of our aims was realised when First Minister Nicola Sturgeon issued a formal state apology

00:00:49.600 to those accused as witches. The first formal state apology ever. We are currently working

00:00:54.400 with politicians to ensure there's legislation passed to pardon those accused as witches

00:00:58.960 to change their status from convicted witches to those who ought never to have been prosecuted

00:01:04.160 we continue our work to obtain a national monument so those who suffered will never be forgotten

00:01:09.120 join us as we speak to the experts on the witchcraft trials both here in scotland and further

00:01:13.760 abroad as we explore the history of women in scotland and continue the cultural conversation

00:01:18.800 of what it means to be a woman hello and welcome to the witches of scotland podcast

00:01:25.920 it's our first podcast of 2024 and i know we've said this before but i really really mean it in

00:01:32.460 my heart and i meant it before it just didn't happen but it will happen we're going to release

00:01:36.780 more episodes this year aren't we claire i'm not even sure if i'm going to be drawn into this i

00:01:41.940 think i think you know you know like the word love is a verb like you just you just do it you don't

00:01:47.760 talk about it yeah are you becoming like an influencer well i'm just thinking we should just

00:01:53.920 hashtag just do it i think i think somebody else has got hashtag just do it would that be nike

00:01:58.780 i think they do i do i don't think okay well infringe on their intellectual property on that

00:02:03.820 one not that not that god knows it's difficult enough to put a podcast without bringing up my

00:02:09.520 couch to 5k disasters in this chat so yes i agree yeah you should just just do it but not

00:02:17.600 like in a nike way we're just we're just gonna make and release podcasts in our defense my lads

00:02:24.840 oh no we've been very busy we have been crazy crazy busy but we are gonna get back on it back

00:02:31.840 on it in a focus ways but today's podcast is is off to a very auspicious start i think it's fair

00:02:37.440 to say claire auspicious auspicious it's easy for you sorry right we're off to a very auspicious

00:02:44.040 start as today we're talking to genuinely some of the most important people in scotland

00:02:49.040 and particularly for researchers within the area of the witch hunts but we'll tell you more about

00:02:53.980 that later before that claire yes thank you i think we genuinely do need to get an actual

00:03:05.060 musician to make us a news i don't see what's wrong with anyway just carry on carry on

00:03:10.960 basically we have got some different news today with people that have got in touch with us and

00:03:16.740 as ever we are delighted to hear from listeners um we get people all over the world as well as

00:03:22.820 we'll be shown in what our news section is today but it's very important for us to know what's

00:03:26.880 going on in different communities and and if we can share and promote anything that you're doing

00:03:30.880 we'd love to do that because one of the really important things about our campaign is about have

00:03:35.600 different people working together under kind of an umbrella and any way that we can help with that

00:03:40.180 we're really happy to do it. So one of the things I want to talk about first is this really cool

00:03:45.820 artist called Rosie Andrew, who I think is still at art school. She's doing the most amazing stuff

00:03:51.560 and she posts some of her work on Instagram as word naser, which I'm going to spell for you. 1.00

00:03:57.140 It's her name backwards, right? So her name is Rosie Andrew and her name on Instagram is

00:04:02.640 at w e r d n a e i s o r so it's rosie andrew backwards okay and we'll try and put some links

00:04:12.600 up to that her work is so interesting and so creepy and so disturbing because what she does

00:04:18.980 is she makes photographs using ai where she imagines different aspects of like the witch

00:04:25.660 trials and it's like it's something that is a kind of mind-blowing what she does it really

00:04:31.500 really brings it to life it's really creepy it's really like beautifully realized they're amazing

00:04:36.840 photographs um are they i don't know if they are they're not photographs it's weird because yeah

00:04:42.500 that's what i was going to i was gonna i was gonna ask so just for the technologically confounded

00:04:48.560 amongst us of which i am one does she like do what they do on some of the apps about like drawing

00:04:57.600 apps where they say can you draw me a picture of a girl in a red dress and the ai imagines that and

00:05:03.600 then you see is it in a pink room or i'm not sure why i've got a girl in a red dress in a pink room

00:05:08.620 but they're black and white they look like real photographs okay so they look like black and white

00:05:13.100 photographs and it looks like it's somebody standing like almost like a member of the press

00:05:17.680 that's photographed different things that have happened okay we're actually going to get her on

00:05:21.640 the show because i think it's really worth looking at because it's one thing talking about people

00:05:26.000 that this happened to it's one thing talking to research researchers who explain what it was that

00:05:30.700 happened to and people in those days it's quite another to see like a visual representation

00:05:35.220 and a painting again is one thing but when it looks like it's a photograph it's actually

00:05:41.020 really hard-hitting like really really interesting so rosie's come on the podcast and talk us through

00:05:46.800 like what our thought process was and how she's made them but just for just now i want to just

00:05:51.260 basically draw people's attention to go and have a look at the photographs because they're really

00:05:54.860 like disturbing but you know in a good way that really makes you think like you know we always

00:06:00.280 say these were people they're not just names you know women not witches but you look at these

00:06:04.640 pictures and you're kind of like oh my god that really really they're just they're fantastic i

00:06:09.660 mean can you imagine how powerful it would have been if photography had been available then just

00:06:14.980 say it was odd somehow magically if you could see pictures of you know all the crowds gathered

00:06:21.540 together pyres very weird but anyway you know there is of course the slight link to photography

00:06:27.560 with the witch trials in that lilius ades remains some of them were photographed her bones were

00:06:33.080 photographed in the very very early stages of the university of st andrews so there is a really

00:06:38.860 tenuous link to photography in the witches but yeah very very fascinating and you know like just

00:06:45.060 to go off on a slight tangent here there must have been people when photography started that

00:06:49.400 viewed photographs as being like witchcraft oh yeah you'd have a person standing there and then

00:06:55.980 through some amazing magical act that the person covered with the black cloak then was able to

00:07:01.040 bring forth an image of these people like that's bananas I don't know Claire have you ever seen

00:07:06.020 the photographs that they used to be I think it was during Victorian period where I know what

00:07:10.540 you're going to say can I just say that where people photograph their dead relatives as still

00:07:15.820 being alive yeah amazing can i just say that's how in tune zoena's brains were because as soon

00:07:23.780 as she started talking about weird photography i'm thinking don't see it don't see it don't see

00:07:29.140 it and then also those pictures of where um mothers had pictures taken of their babies but

00:07:35.180 the babies were too small to support themselves so the mothers behind like covered in fabric

00:07:39.760 holding the baby and and at first glance a lot of them see the baby and then the closer you look

00:07:46.380 you're like gee there's a woman or a person anyway is that is that like is that like passport

00:07:52.500 photographs where you have to like hold the baby and like sideways I'm not being funny anybody that

00:07:58.000 has actually got a passport photograph of a tiny baby which I did with mine they were all very lucky

00:08:02.540 to travel as tiny tiny infants I had to get photographs of my oldest son who's now 20 when

00:08:08.360 he was like he must have been two weeks old and I remember us holding him up in the photo booth

00:08:14.280 and trying to prop his wee neck so his head was up it's a great photograph though but I didn't sit

00:08:19.380 behind him with cloth on like that was very much underneath the kind of the booth anyway

00:08:23.960 and were the Victorians doing that so the children looked as if they were floating or just so they

00:08:28.160 were part of the photo just so that it looked like the baby could support themselves I think

00:08:33.260 oh I see right okay so the mother's meant to be invisible although they're not though because

00:08:38.060 you know well i mean we're off that tracking start here with anyway zoe i'm so glad we decided to let

00:08:44.200 you do the first news item because that means we've just we've skied down a completely different

00:08:49.460 path already this is the beauty of learning it's all about curiosity so that's rosie andrew so

00:08:57.340 just remember that it's rosie andrew spelled r-o-s-i-e andrew pretty straightforward backwards

00:09:03.000 so it's word naser definitely worth having a look at and she's only in I think she's maybe in her

00:09:08.460 final year at art school third or fourth year art school and also an incredibly talented painter so

00:09:13.260 you can see some of her paintings too so I'm definitely going to go and see her work when

00:09:17.220 she does her degree show whether it's this spring or it's next spring anyway talking about going to

00:09:21.820 see things Zoe aye aye how good was that the museum of Abernethy has some interesting things

00:09:27.320 in the pipeline and we'd advise you to follow what they're doing on their Facebook page because

00:09:32.100 they got some funding from Perth and Kinross

00:09:34.360 Heritage and Trust

00:09:35.560 to create a memorial for Abernethy

00:09:37.960 witches. The stone 0.64

00:09:39.760 that they have got is now

00:09:41.920 with the mason and as things

00:09:43.880 develop they're going to be sharing images and

00:09:45.900 news. So another

00:09:48.020 place in Scotland that's erecting

00:09:50.220 another memorial to the people

00:09:51.880 killed in their village as

00:09:53.900 witches. So absolutely fantastic

00:09:56.000 news to see that. Follow them on

00:09:57.980 Facebook to keep up to date with that.

00:10:00.620 Okay. And we've

00:10:01.940 been contacted by another artist haven't we Claire yeah we've been contacted by Anita de Soto I hope

00:10:08.480 that's the correct pronunciation she is based all the way across the world in New Zealand

00:10:12.880 and is an artist who's retelling women's stories responding to art history from a feminist

00:10:18.900 perspective I mean that's just got to be interesting already when you've got so many 0.81

00:10:24.640 male painters looking at the world it's so interesting she's sort of rethinking the master's

00:10:30.420 paintings oh wow I love that idea like you know as if it's a woman that's thinking about the

00:10:36.420 placement of like women and men in the paintings rather than all being about the men in the

00:10:40.140 foreground it's more about the women and women standing either willow like willowy at the side

00:10:46.260 or you know lying dying in someone someone's arms it's always the way um so Anita has created

00:10:53.180 several works about witch hunts and is really looking at the women taking centre stage and

00:10:58.300 like as you've said master's paintings which was all about the men so please do go and look at her

00:11:04.700 work it's anitadesoto.com that's a-n-i-t-a-d-e-s-o-t-o.com and have a look at images of

00:11:17.100 the witch hunts and other things her work is quite different in comparison to rosie so rosie

00:11:22.480 andrew's work is like absolutely about the witch hunts and it's more about like sort of like the

00:11:27.800 time period and it's like about like my my reading of it is like it's about sort of like fertility

00:11:32.860 and it's about women being sort of frightening to the men and the men can almost not bear to

00:11:38.120 look at them so i think a lot of our listeners would be really interested in like these really

00:11:41.320 beautifully painted works that she's done really lovely well please do look at that now we have

00:11:48.300 loads more news um lots of people get in contact with us as usual we are working through our list

00:11:55.340 so please don't think

00:11:57.760 because you've contacted us

00:11:59.020 and we haven't given you a shout out this time

00:12:01.760 that's all the news that there is

00:12:02.980 we do work through it

00:12:04.140 and please do continue to get in contact with us

00:12:06.540 if there's other news that you want to share

00:12:09.240 yeah you can get in touch with us

00:12:10.900 through Facebook Messenger

00:12:12.700 or through Twitter

00:12:14.940 I think to be honest

00:12:17.100 Twitter, I know it's not called that anymore

00:12:19.660 is usually a quicker way to get in touch

00:12:22.000 because Facebook we get quite a lot of people

00:12:24.040 but if we've not got back to you please do give us a nudge and because you know I know I always

00:12:29.360 say this but Claire and I've both got really intense full-time jobs and various other things

00:12:33.360 that we do as well we don't have any staff there's no committee it's just me and Claire

00:12:36.880 so sometimes we will miss things with best will in the world so please just if you've not heard

00:12:41.760 just give us another another nudge and and hopefully we can we can then share the stuff

00:12:46.780 that you're doing because it's really great to hear all the different things and be able to

00:12:50.080 connect people up with other people. So today we're going to remember Jonnet Wishart who was

00:12:55.880 a woman of the age of 44 and she was in Aberdeenshire. She was arrested on the 2nd of February

00:13:02.480 1597 and her trial was then on the 17th of February so just two weeks later. Her trial 0.56

00:13:09.700 place was in the toll booth and she was found guilty. Now the reason I've highlighted Jonnet

00:13:14.120 wisher today is um because she seemed to be part of a family group who were possibly um just an

00:13:22.920 unpopular family in their community and what it actually says in the database is that they were

00:13:29.240 it was a likely to be a neighborhood dispute against an argumentative and unpopular family

00:13:34.440 so john it seems to be kind of like the central person and then there's other people accused

00:13:39.960 including her son who ended up being executed some of the people accused were banished

00:13:44.780 um but i think they were all pretty much found guilty and what she was initially accused of

00:13:49.640 was casting cantrips i've not read that word before well do you know i i actually was so

00:13:55.980 interested i looked up and a cantrip is apparently a magic spell of any kind or one which reads the

00:14:04.280 same forward or backwards but it can also mean a witch's trick or a sham and interestingly enough

00:14:12.080 cantrip is a word which is used in the worldwide game dungeons and dragons but it is in fact a

00:14:19.400 scots word and the the original word apparently comes from a gallic term can oh i'm not even

00:14:27.700 going to try and pronounce that i'm so sorry everyone that speaks gaelic i'll just spell it

00:14:32.340 C-A-N-N-T-A-I-R-E-A-C-H-D.

00:14:38.320 Canteriect.

00:14:40.420 Which is a piper's mnemonic chant.

00:14:44.140 Not demonic, mnemonic.

00:14:46.320 That's what a cantrip is.

00:14:47.700 I'm going to add that to my everyday language now.

00:14:49.780 Did you just look up that bit about Dungeons and Dragons

00:14:52.140 and find that out?

00:14:52.920 Or do you know the word cantrip

00:14:54.240 because you play Dungeons and Dragons?

00:14:57.000 Zoe's so pleased with that question, right?

00:14:59.260 She sat back and is giggling to herself.

00:15:01.800 i will have you know there is nothing wrong with playing dungeons and dragons i just i would just

00:15:08.900 be surprised to learn if that was part of your hobbies that is not part of my hobby i think

00:15:15.260 would have come up by now zoe yeah but sometimes claire sometimes claire you reveal a thing to me

00:15:20.760 where i just go what how do i not know all that already like for an example i learned quite early

00:15:26.520 on but I'm sharing this Claire that you're a black belt in uh is it karate it is it is

00:15:33.380 black belt in shoto can karate I mean that's I'm just anyway let's move on let's move on

00:15:38.980 anyway so she was accused Jonnet of um casting cantrips or spells but also of shape-shifting

00:15:46.160 into a dog and there were lots of accusations of her causing illness and deaths she was accused

00:15:51.800 of delaying the delivery of a child and of causing the child to be stillborn I think there was

00:15:55.560 different accusations as well about like wet nursing and things like that and the stories

00:16:00.320 that other people in her family were accused of like her son I think was accused of prophecy

00:16:04.460 because he said that his partner was going to be having a baby daughter before the woman even knew

00:16:11.760 she was pregnant so like the whole family were kind of you know accused of things which made

00:16:16.320 me think about some of the research that Judith Langland Scott has done about the unpopularity

00:16:21.080 is that a word i don't know my brain's on a go slow and on the popularity of people and about

00:16:27.460 them being targeted because it was a straight more straightforward way of getting rid of people

00:16:32.720 that were problematic in the community so it seems a bit like that but in the database it also says

00:16:37.620 the cause of the witch's malice came from failed business interaction and she was also accused of

00:16:43.120 property damage um of damaging um estates and she was accused of spoiling a whole brew of ale

00:16:50.340 and attempting to poison a child who she'd wanted to wet nurse and then it also says other charges

00:16:57.120 murder sorcery cursing but as is often the case with the the documentation it must be patchy and

00:17:03.600 that's why it doesn't go into detail about things it's so frustrating that you can't go well who was

00:17:08.620 she accused of murdering because you i mean it just it doesn't exist it's sort of scrappy paperwork

00:17:14.000 which does make it quite hard to research in different ways and but i know that there are

00:17:18.340 researchers out there who really really know how to do research that then will find something like

00:17:22.900 that and then do their very best to try and kind of get to the root of it and find the paperwork

00:17:26.980 through different ways and means anyway so the other members of her family were accused including

00:17:32.160 her son she was found guilty and sentenced to death and it just said um by burning but it didn't

00:17:39.520 you know because like normally we talk about them being strangled and then burned but it said by

00:17:43.200 burning so i don't know if that if that is a different sort of scenario and it doesn't have

00:17:47.760 her date of execution um interestingly so there's lots of info but not all the info

00:17:53.440 yeah i'm very much hoping that it was just a sort of the writer's response that she was burnt

00:18:00.820 rather than saying she was strangled and burnt i very much hope she didn't suffer

00:18:04.560 i'm very yeah she didn't suffer that horror just to come back to it i can't remember if i said this

00:18:11.020 already was that there were 19 female accusers and 25 male accusers yeah that's what i was going

00:18:17.520 to say it was it was basically if it was a a village or an area within Aberdeenshire it was

00:18:23.800 it was the entire um maybe not entire but it was a huge amount of people that came out

00:18:30.040 to make accusations you you've got to wonder you know in juries when they're thinking about whether

00:18:37.720 or not people are guilty and I don't know if this was a jury trial I suspect it wasn't I suspect it

00:18:43.140 was probably just a judge sitting by themselves but juries are told to think carefully about each

00:18:50.240 individual witness and to decide whether or not they believe the allegations of each witness and

00:18:55.820 whether or not they're true or not but one witness's evidence can help support another witness's

00:19:03.200 evidence because you can think well I'm not really 100% sure about that witness's evidence

00:19:08.660 but the other one is absolutely compelling so if they're telling one story and the other story is

00:19:14.220 so like it that helps me look at the other story and go that's probably right so it's just human

00:19:20.940 nature if if you've got one person alleging something happens then you think oh okay that

00:19:26.640 could be true if you've got 30 people alleging it or 50 people alleging it the more people that

00:19:32.400 allege it the more likely you are to think that it's true yeah but we also know through the

00:19:39.700 research that we've done that people would make accusations to give themselves more standing in

00:19:45.860 the community or even you know and i think this is quite understandable to protect themselves from

00:19:50.680 accusation absolutely you were an accuser you were less likely to be the accused maybe

00:19:55.160 so yeah scary combination of things that happened so we remember her today and her death in 1519

00:20:02.380 so our guests today i don't know why i'm doing another terrible musical bit but our guests

00:20:12.440 today we've been trying to arrange to have them on for absolutely ages like literally since the

00:20:16.740 beginning of us recording the podcast and we finally managed to actually get a date that

00:20:20.080 works for everybody so our guests today are none other than professor julian goodair who's an

00:20:26.340 esteemed expert on many areas of history but pre-eminently about um pre-eminently is that

00:20:31.840 the right word yeah pre-eminently i'm not sure it is um mostly about the witch trials so we've

00:20:38.460 we've mentioned professor julian goodere on various occasions we've had him on as a guest

00:20:42.500 right back at the beginning and we've also got him on today with ewan mccandrew who's the wic

00:20:48.040 medium in residence at the university of edinburgh and who is amongst other things responsible for

00:20:53.660 the database and that's what we're really going to be talking about today and then our third guest

00:20:57.880 today is ruby imry who's a fourth year computing student at the university of edinburgh she'll

00:21:02.740 explain to you her her part of being involved in the project now this is quite an unusual podcast

00:21:07.920 in that claire wasn't able to do it because i told her one day but actually it was the next day so

00:21:14.700 we both turned up on the monday for the meeting and our zoom and we're both like oh i wonder wonder

00:21:19.900 where the guests are like that's unusual that nobody's turned up and then a little light bulb 0.97

00:21:23.960 went on in my mind that went Zoe you idiot I think you've arranged with them for Tuesday and 0.94

00:21:28.360 then Claire couldn't do Tuesday because of her work down in London so um this is a podcast where 0.84

00:21:34.280 it's just me so I'm really sorry everybody I hope you can suffer the horror of not having Claire

00:21:38.660 oh best of luck everyone okay so without any further ado Professor Julian Goodyear

00:21:45.160 Ewan McAndrew and Ruby Emery

00:21:53.960 i'm delighted tonight to finally be able to speak to to leading lights in the scottish area about

00:22:04.020 recording and looking at the history of the witch trials tonight our guests are people that are

00:22:08.700 working on a resource that i know nearly everybody that's involved in looking at the witch trials and

00:22:14.080 has an interest in the witch trials in scotland is using frequently not just once but going back

00:22:19.140 to and looking at again and that is the database and i'm gonna i'm not going to talk too much about

00:22:24.040 that i'm going to let the people that know about this talk about it properly but tonight we have

00:22:28.680 got actually i'm going to let you introduce yourselves because you'll do a better job of

00:22:32.420 this right so julian could you introduce yourself first please okay yes i'm julian julian good air

00:22:37.200 and i'm emeritus professor of history at university of edumbra and i'm going to tell the story going

00:22:44.620 back to the 1990s long before I became a professor or anything but it's the story of the survey of

00:22:51.120 Scottish witchcraft. Julian we're delighted to have you with us because obviously you're such

00:22:54.520 a luminary in this area so thank you so much for making the time to come on tonight and then we

00:22:58.920 have Ewan. Hello Ewan. Hi so hello my name's Ewan McAndrew and I work at the University of Edinburgh

00:23:07.260 as the Wikimedian in residence so that involves all sorts of projects in curriculum out of

00:23:15.220 curriculum work with Wikipedia and Wikidata looking at how we can support and benefit

00:23:22.400 and contribute to open knowledge and open data at the university in teaching learning and research

00:23:28.860 but I've been in post since 2016 so but it allows me to work with a lot of students that are doing

00:23:36.280 and they get to experience open knowledge and open data in their own right as well.

00:23:41.300 That was a really slick link to our third guest tonight,

00:23:45.640 a well done, very professional, who is Ruby.

00:23:48.300 Ruby, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

00:23:50.660 Hi, I'm Ruby and I'm a student at the University of Edinburgh

00:23:54.040 who's currently doing an internship with you

00:23:56.460 and working on the interactive map of the Scottish Accused Witches

00:24:01.460 and adding some new features to that website.

00:24:05.160 Great. So we're going to kind of do a chronological look.

00:24:07.820 So Julian, then Ewan, and then Ruby, whose second name is Emery.

00:24:10.340 She's not just called Ruby.

00:24:12.660 I'm always terrible for that as well.

00:24:14.480 So, OK, thank you all so much for joining us tonight.

00:24:17.160 So Julian, would you take us through why this project started

00:24:20.960 that you were involved with in the very beginning, please?

00:24:23.720 OK, well, this project started in the mid-1990s

00:24:28.560 and there were four of us in the original team.

00:24:31.240 there was me, Julien Gooder, there was Louise Yeoman, who was the co-director, I was the director,

00:24:37.160 and then there were the two researchers, Lauren Martin and Joyce Miller. And so how four of us

00:24:43.400 came together. And initially, it was me and Louise. And in the 1990s, we were both genius

00:24:50.360 scholars who were interested in various aspects of Scottish history, including witchcraft. And we

00:24:55.160 were beginning to look into witchcraft, and there had been some very good work done in the 1970s.

00:25:01.240 and Christine Alana, who was a great pioneer of the subject, had written a brilliant book called

00:25:07.560 Enemies of God, the Witch Hunt in Scotland, published in 1981. She had also directed a

00:25:12.520 project that had produced, if you like, a database or at least a list of all the witchcraft cases

00:25:17.800 that she and her colleagues could find, and then produced a book called the Sourcebook of Scottish

00:25:22.680 Witchcraft. And Louise and I were using this and we knew a lot about the Sourcebook of Scottish

00:25:28.840 witchcraft and how useful it was but we said to ourselves you know this isn't the last word on

00:25:35.240 the subject they didn't look at local church records and we know that there's a lot more

00:25:40.760 witches in those records and there's various other areas where we could improve it and

00:25:47.000 in the 1990s people had more idea about computers and louise and i were having coffee and i said to

00:25:52.920 to Louise, we could do a new database, you know, not just an improvement to the sourcebook that

00:25:59.260 we know, but let's just do a completely new one. And we'll have more fields and we'll have the

00:26:04.060 power of computers and have much more data and make it sort of searchable. And, you know, the

00:26:10.280 latest thing we thought, you know, we could put it on a CD-ROM. And we started developing this

00:26:15.580 project. And there were other historical projects that were doing databases on CD-ROMs. But in the

00:26:20.940 late 90s, people are beginning to have this thing called the

00:26:24.000 internet and the World Wide Web. And we noticed that it seemed

00:26:27.180 to be possible to put a database on a website. Now, this was at a

00:26:32.180 time when a lot of people weren't using the internet at

00:26:34.200 all. But we noticed it was possible to put a database on a

00:26:37.380 website, cutting edge in those days. And so we jacked in the

00:26:41.700 idea of a CD-ROM and we decided we'd go for a web-based

00:26:47.860 resource instead. So we, we designed the project. And as

00:26:52.420 Louise and I were doing this, I got an email from this woman in

00:26:55.180 America, you know, hi, I'm Lauren, I'm interested in women

00:26:59.000 and the Scottish witch hunter, I'm doing a PhD and want to make

00:27:03.580 links. And yeah, she started joining our project. And then we

00:27:08.440 also met Joyce Miller, who was doing a PhD on magical healers,

00:27:16.180 charmers and she was using a lot of the same records and yeah so she got involved as well

00:27:23.780 and so we put a funding bit into the economic and social research council can we have money to

00:27:28.340 employ lauren and joyce to go around and look at the local archives and gather a lot more data

00:27:35.300 and so that's how the service college rich path was born and it went on online in 2003 and

00:27:42.180 Originally, it did actually have a map, but the map was the most troublesome feature of it, and it kept breaking.

00:27:50.360 And more than once, I tried to get it fixed.

00:27:54.160 But in 2019, along came a much better map that I hope Ewan will tell us about in a minute.

00:28:03.440 In fact, he might tell us about it right now, but I'm going to pause just in case Zoe or anyone else has got any questions about what I've just said.

00:28:10.460 What were people's reactions to you working on this new database? Because now, obviously, the witch trials are of great public interest. But even when we started what we were doing sort of three years ago, I don't think it was as broadly spoken about. So did people know and talk about it out with academia?

00:28:28.300 It wasn't talked about so much. Lauren and Joyce used to say to me, you know, when they would go into the archives or when they were talking to other researchers, they would say, they would get into conversation and this person would say, oh, and so are you a witch yourself?

00:28:47.360 We get that all the time.

00:28:48.280 They often got asked that, right?

00:28:49.900 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a very gendered thing because I don't think ever in my career I've ever once been asked that.

00:28:57.440 really julian that's really i mean it's sort of not surprising but also mind-boggling

00:29:02.580 that people just absolutely wouldn't wouldn't think that they take you as a serious historian

00:29:07.520 serious academic whereas a woman doing it every single event that claire and i do every single 0.65

00:29:13.220 event we have to say we're not witches it's fine if you are a witch we'd have a problem with witches

00:29:17.820 if that's what you identify as in the modern day but we're absolutely magical and we're the

00:29:22.480 complete opposite of that really so it's that's really interesting to me yeah yeah yeah um it did

00:29:30.840 have a public profile and students were interested in it and it was something that made people sit up

00:29:35.980 and you know some of the other things that louise and i do like covenanting piety you know it's a

00:29:42.660 sort of leash thing or taxation which i do yeah i don't get lots of emails going to tell us about

00:29:49.520 taxation and it's less grabby it's less grabby that's right i did get once into the sunday times

00:29:54.860 uh about this james has nearly bankrupted scotland or something along those lines

00:29:59.540 um um but um uh yeah by and large it's the the the witches that have public um profile but certainly

00:30:10.260 the the amount of interest has grown and i can't quite work out why it's grown because i'm just a

00:30:16.060 historian you know i don't study the present day but yeah more and more people have have been

00:30:21.660 interested in it yeah i think people identify very strongly often a lot of the people that we

00:30:28.260 um we meet at events and who get in touch with us certainly through the podcast and through the

00:30:32.460 campaign i think really identify with those that were accused as witches and have an idea that they

00:30:37.740 themselves would have been accused of being a witch which is interesting and obviously we

00:30:41.980 unpicked a lot through you know talks with people like yourself julian um and how how realistic that

00:30:48.640 is but um i think definitely it's a big identity thing and i think it's it's a really horribly

00:30:53.680 compelling story as well and people are often shocked to learn the magnitude of it within

00:31:00.040 scotland i think that often grabs people's attention so yeah and one of the things we did

00:31:04.580 actually is we increased the size of the scottish witch hunt because when we looked at all the local

00:31:09.440 records we found more riches than the previous projects have found and do you feel that there's

00:31:14.100 more even than than you uncovered at that point because i know you've said to us before you had

00:31:18.300 a certain amount of funding and a certain amount of time and there might have been more if you'd

00:31:22.240 had more money and more time well part of the problem is that a lot of records just have gone

00:31:26.800 you know the records are never going to be complete you know there will have been thousands

00:31:31.460 of records that are mostly lost um i don't think that there are thousands and thousands of complete

00:31:39.420 the unknown names i think we've got most of the names um what what what we lack in scotland

00:31:45.600 is um a lot of detail from for most of the the the riches and you know anybody who uses the

00:31:53.580 survey sooner or later realizes this um is you know we've got a name a place a date um you know

00:32:01.500 a thing saying you know commission was issued and maybe some other people that were supposedly

00:32:06.980 tried along with them do we know about the trial have we got the outcome you know there's just

00:32:12.980 field after fields knowing finish yeah and so there's a lot of people who've got names but

00:32:18.820 very little else and you know we suspect these people weren't at the stake most of them probably

00:32:23.540 were um but the details we can't be sure but we've got quite a lot that we do have details of and so

00:32:32.020 they can stand for the others they they are representative and there's a lot more that is

00:32:38.040 still to be found out about this when i was having coffee this morning with somebody who wants to do

00:32:42.460 a phd on this while we're talking about this or that idea for things that we really don't know

00:32:47.360 and i think what's really fascinating is the work that you've done julian and then what you've gone

00:32:51.580 on to do you and obviously with the with the project more recently is that there are people

00:32:56.420 sort of citizen historians across scotland and out with scotland that are beavering away at

00:33:02.060 looking at their own area you know or you know historically where they think their family was

00:33:06.320 originally um you know judith judith langland scott is doing some really interesting stuff in

00:33:12.660 forfair she's uncovered like i think some like i don't want to speak for her she'll speak for

00:33:17.180 herself when she's back on the podcast again but she's uncovered a lot of people that weren't

00:33:21.700 covered initially because she she has the time and it's her personal focus and interest to really

00:33:27.280 dig deep into that area and I think that's something that the database is amazing for

00:33:31.560 because it means that people can say right here's the starting point here's the information we've

00:33:35.520 got and then can go and physically or online then go and kind of beaver away in a way that

00:33:40.760 you probably can't really in an institution because you just don't have the time I would say

00:33:45.660 so you know yeah yeah and you and what happened when you got involved then so at what point did

00:33:51.940 you step into it i'm sort of like classed as a digital skills trainer working in the university's

00:33:59.040 information services and the idea is i'm kind of like a uh a resource and my boss calls me

00:34:06.920 uncharitably a tool for uh course leaders and student societies and anyone at the university

00:34:15.020 to explore how Wikipedia could support in, you know,

00:34:19.840 projects work or in curriculum work and also Wikidata

00:34:24.720 because Wikipedia is like 21 years old

00:34:26.920 and it's the largest open education resource in human history

00:34:31.040 and it's preferentialized in Google, the number one search engine as well.

00:34:35.760 But there was only like about 15% of biographies about women

00:34:39.520 and there was only three articles on Wikipedia six years ago

00:34:44.460 about scottish witches now we have now we have 49 i'm i'm kind of sad to say we don't have 50

00:34:51.260 at the moment but i've just counted them um but you know the 50th one will come soon but wiki data

00:34:58.060 is another project that's got it's it's machine readable information that you can query and

00:35:05.580 visualize in different ways and the university wants to teach people uh well students in

00:35:10.620 particular about how to work with open data and they wanted to see if there was something we could

00:35:15.580 do with data science students working with the survey of scottish witchcraft to make it more

00:35:22.060 explorable and we worked we did like little short-term projects with design informatics

00:35:28.700 students where they just started creating machine readable data about the accused witches

00:35:35.420 um and we were starting to sort of think what else can we take from the survey of scottish

00:35:39.820 switchcraft for future projects and we noticed that one of the the there are lots of gaps in

00:35:45.980 the database obviously because it's a historical document um but one of the things we found was

00:35:53.100 that there was five columns of information about where they were supposed to have resided

00:35:58.940 and pretty much for each one of them not all of them there was a name of a place

00:36:05.500 that we could if we could try and hunt down where that place was on a map like try and assign

00:36:13.980 coordinate locations then we could sort of maybe explore put it on a map and have it have the

00:36:21.740 surveys information explorable in a completely different way because as julian said um the

00:36:27.900 mapping feature previously broken and uh and we weren't able to sort of like look at it in a

00:36:34.620 anyway but credit goes to anne-marie scott who was my line manager at the time and she said why

00:36:40.140 don't we have an intern and get a geography student to sort of work for 12 weeks over the summer

00:36:46.620 and see if they can hunt down like 800 place names and see if looking old gazetteers uh you know

00:36:55.420 gallic uh sort of resources place name books the scottish archives ask julian questions because a

00:37:03.740 a lot of these places don't exist anymore and so she it was an enormous amount of detective work

00:37:09.420 went in and six weeks was taken up just trying to find where these places were and whether they'd

00:37:15.860 been subsumed into a larger or more modern town or if they were just like a hamlet somewhere that

00:37:22.860 just disappeared completely um and then once she'd done that or isn't in with about 25 that she still

00:37:31.880 couldn't quite approximate um then we had to decide okay now we can map this resource and

00:37:41.400 and we worked with a really lovely developer who's really talented richard lawson and he he

00:37:48.440 built us a website in the and worked with emma our our geography student to put all her map

00:37:55.400 visualizations on our website and that we thought that was the end of her 12-week internship and

00:38:00.840 that was that but uh it was just the beginning as it turned out this was back in 2019 because we got

00:38:08.520 emma to do a presentation on her project at a seminar at the university library and professor

00:38:16.200 melissa terrace was at that event and saw the resource that she created and tweeted it out

00:38:22.840 and and or i'm not sure if you're supposed to say xed out now but i'm not going to call it that

00:38:28.280 not doing it not doing it but basically sort of like as soon as like melissa terrace had sort of

00:38:34.440 posted it out there it was out there in the world and people what was really nice is that we were

00:38:38.760 getting feedback about local people like you said you know that they were exploring it and doing all

00:38:45.880 this sort of historical research of their own and they were quite sort of i don't know it affected

00:38:51.880 me and emma particularly that just how people took to it and you know they would research someone

00:38:59.000 local to them yeah it's really fascinating a huge rush of interest in 2019 there was a huge

00:39:06.520 rush of interest when that i don't know if it was just one tweet that did it but you know when when

00:39:11.960 when you made that map and it went public that you know it was like being at the top of the charts

00:39:17.320 yeah that's really cool you know i i used to say in 2019 i had the busiest halloween i've ever had

00:39:25.060 i mean how often do historians really hit on something like that that the public the modern

00:39:30.860 day public gets involved with you know it's it's often so sort of niche isn't it i suppose the work

00:39:36.280 that you do but this is something that's crossed lots of different types of people different classes

00:39:41.660 you know men and women it's i think it is more women that are interested anecdotally but all

00:39:47.680 over scotland canada america australia places in europe and you know i want to put you in touch

00:39:53.440 the woman who's got in touch with me in the last few weeks from hollywood who's doing really

00:39:58.620 interesting stuff and she's taken your database i am completely not at all understanding of what

00:40:06.160 she's done okay so i'm just going to forward it to you but she's taken it and she's made the

00:40:10.340 database into different graphs and she's talking about using open source to fill in gaps that she

00:40:16.860 thinks are there so i'm going to put her in touch with you if that's okay because i thought that

00:40:20.320 sounds like quite an interesting sort of combination of things but it's really ignited

00:40:24.600 people's interest and people feel like well this i'm going from a point of truth this isn't a made

00:40:30.700 up thing it's not the myth that surrounds the witch trials it's actual verifiable hard facts

00:40:37.220 that have been found and collated by real historians

00:40:40.840 and academics that know what they're doing.

00:40:43.300 Why have you now looked at taking it in a different direction?

00:40:47.800 Is that the right way of putting it with the internship

00:40:49.760 that Ruby Emery's done?

00:40:51.400 Like what's happened recently?

00:40:53.680 I think because it had such interest.

00:40:55.860 We get sort of like feedback and sort of reports

00:41:00.900 on who's accessing it.

00:41:02.280 It's like from about 160 different countries around the world,

00:41:06.380 so places like fiji and turkey seemed to sort of like had a a spark of interest as well but

00:41:13.500 i think it was the the fact that i am and julian's really the expert on this like you can make

00:41:19.900 generalizations i guess about certain panics but i i'm pretty sure or well again i'm going to

00:41:27.740 mention julian sort of like maybe bring him into this but just that any kind of generalization you

00:41:33.820 sort of like once you start delving into the individual cases there are exceptions to those

00:41:39.500 generalizations as well and that it was really about the individual human stories that that we

00:41:46.300 we kind of switched on to that we we wanted to do more work because we felt that there was such a

00:41:53.420 rich vein of information in the survey and we'd only sort of tapped the surface of like really

00:41:59.500 sort of like high level information about um their names their gender and their place of residence

00:42:08.700 we wanted to get the the sort of full witchcraft investigations that from you know the denunciation

00:42:16.140 to arrest to imprisonment and the trial and uh and the outcome of the trial in a machine readable

00:42:23.260 forms so people could learn the stories and explore the stories um so that sort of necessitated

00:42:30.220 getting another intern and we we had our second witch finder general internship in 2022 in the

00:42:37.740 summer and that was maggie lynn and she spent a good amount of her time just she she looked at

00:42:45.500 all the information really rich information about witchcraft investigations and tried to turn it 0.92

00:42:50.060 into machine-readable structured data that we could then put on our website.

00:42:54.800 But she did so much work that it was really rushed at the end of her internship 0.93

00:43:00.320 to get it embedded onto the website.

00:43:03.240 And we were a bit concerned that, A, there might be some bugs

00:43:06.780 in some of the sort of development because it was that little bit of rushing

00:43:11.820 at the end, but also because there was so much data that we wanted

00:43:16.800 to make sure that we weren't misrepresenting it.

00:43:20.060 and that there was we wanted to make sure that like you said this was verifiable information

00:43:25.740 that you could trust to explore and not misrepresent these women's stories so that 1.00

00:43:32.060 meant that we needed a third uh to come in uh and that was ruby to sort of like help us check the

00:43:39.340 data get it make sure it's all right and make sure the development of the site is is is perfect and

00:43:46.140 and as explorable and as user-friendly as we would possibly want it to be.

00:43:50.760 So, Ruby, what was it like for you coming into this project?

00:43:54.220 I mean, you're what, between, you're now in fourth year, aren't you?

00:43:58.220 So is it the summer between third and fourth year that you're working on it,

00:44:01.480 just this summer past?

00:44:03.040 I deployed to a few different internships because I studied computing,

00:44:06.780 so this wasn't the most obvious thing for me,

00:44:09.720 like what I would expect to do in an internship,

00:44:11.500 but it ended up being the most interesting one I could have done

00:44:13.880 because I was working on the web side of things as well

00:44:17.380 but also meanwhile getting to learn so much about the Scottish Witch Trails

00:44:21.720 which I'd heard of before but I've been able to learn so much from it

00:44:26.120 and then I had used the interactive map before as well

00:44:29.620 I think I've seen them when the university first created it

00:44:32.640 and that is such a good way to be able to find out things about them

00:44:37.140 because the survey obviously you can search on things

00:44:39.780 but you can just play around with the map

00:44:41.940 and then find things you wouldn't be expecting to be looking for and then it is like really cool

00:44:47.300 for people to be able to like look at where they live and see the witches they were accused from

00:44:51.300 that area and things like that so i was really excited when i first started getting to work on

00:44:55.940 it because it's such like a unique internship for me to be able to get it really interesting

00:45:00.660 and so are you finished your work on that now or is there still something going for you no so we're

00:45:06.820 now and i'm now doing it one day a week because so there's like going to be a new version of the

00:45:11.300 website release which has kind of the new visualizations which the previous interns created

00:45:16.500 and some new features have added as well and we've been checking the data as well so like because the

00:45:22.580 data has been uploaded onto wikidata which is the sister project wikipedia that means like so it's

00:45:28.660 open linked data which means other people can edit it which is a really positive thing because

00:45:33.460 it means as we know like the survey was created in late 90s early 2000s so new information could

00:45:38.820 have been revealed since then so I've been comparing what's on wikidata now to the original

00:45:44.020 survey and then kind of been contacting Julian to fact check things like that and looking at

00:45:48.580 the resources and that means like that the map can have the most up-to-date factual information

00:45:53.780 that we can have possible because after the map we do get contacted by people being like well we

00:45:59.940 think this bit of information is wrong and which is like really cool to hear from people because

00:46:04.740 you know people are really looking at enjoying the resource but it's also um reminds you like

00:46:09.060 um the kind of importance of making sure that the information you're presenting to so many

00:46:13.380 schools is as correct as possible when people get in touch and they say oh this bit's wrong

00:46:18.680 and then you check it i don't know if julian i've just got a picture of you sitting with just

00:46:22.740 hundreds of books around you just trying to work out like is this bit true or not

00:46:26.160 are they generally right that it's wrong or is it right if you see what i mean because i think

00:46:33.100 a lot of people have kind of like local myth very embedded and think that that's true but it's maybe

00:46:40.400 not actually true so julian what's your experience with that sorry sorry ruby sorry yeah i guess also

00:46:47.040 it's to do with emma's work as well when she was geolocating the information like there could be

00:46:50.740 aggregated there as well right and when she was locating them that could be where some of the

00:46:55.760 mistakes were made as places are the original survey as you know some places just aren't there

00:47:00.920 anymore so that's maybe hard to pinpoint so julian have you found that when people say

00:47:06.200 that it's that's not correct are they right and saying it's not right um with factual information

00:47:12.680 like this is where such and such a place is yes they they're usually right and i'm the um the

00:47:20.520 couple of instances uh occur to me that um uh i think um emma in 2019 located one of the witches

00:47:30.280 in the south of england uh you might remember this year and we never noticed it because the

00:47:35.720 you know we we didn't zoom out of the map far enough to notice that the and it just was a

00:47:42.200 similar place name and it's probably just a slip of the mouse to just go yeah that's the name it

00:47:47.400 matches up quick um i think you got that one fixed didn't you and then the original survey

00:47:53.320 had um someone where the place name was ireland and i i think the researchers have gone well you

00:47:59.400 know that's somewhere in Ireland yeah well okay but actually it turns out that there is a place

00:48:03.720 called Ireland in Orkney oh okay yeah I hope that particular one is right in the interactive map

00:48:13.560 the name of that one I can't remember offhand but yeah those are the kinds of things I think

00:48:18.840 there was someone who got in touch and pointed out that it's Ireland in Orkney the places it

00:48:25.640 it sounds like more than the stories of the actual accusations or whatever so when does the new

00:48:31.720 website get launched when can people have a look at it um at some point next year i think we're

00:48:37.860 looking at either let's say august or november i think that's what we're thinking yeah so there's

00:48:43.640 some new features on that like a searchable timeline um which allows you to see like the

00:48:51.000 which is in order of their trials in terms of dates,

00:48:54.440 and then you can click on them

00:48:55.560 and read some more stories in contextual manner,

00:48:58.840 which is another cool way to get across the individual story

00:49:02.400 of the women and men that were accused.

00:49:05.400 And then there's also lots of new information

00:49:07.840 that's been added because in the current version,

00:49:10.280 it's like, you can see location, gender, and occupation,

00:49:15.360 but there's a lot of new features

00:49:18.240 which show you information about the investigations,

00:49:20.720 what they were accused of, for example, their pacts with the devil,

00:49:23.660 meetings with the devil, ritual objects and things like that.

00:49:27.300 So that's what's...

00:49:28.160 Amazing. Really fantastic.

00:49:30.300 And it's such, as a teacher, like my teacher hat on,

00:49:33.260 it's such a useful resource.

00:49:34.780 And it's definitely a subject that is now being taught in a lot more schools

00:49:38.760 because people have read about the database

00:49:41.480 or they've read maybe a book that Julian's written

00:49:43.980 or they've heard of the campaign

00:49:45.100 or they've read a novel that's come out recently.

00:49:47.760 And people are much more switched on.

00:49:49.280 And we've had a fair few history teachers in Scotland getting in touch saying, you know, I'm teaching this and we've been asked to go and give talks in schools and things.

00:49:57.160 So that's really heartening to see, because I feel really strongly that we need to understand our history.

00:50:01.800 It's really important to the contemporary life in Scotland and the future that we get our history and we get it right.

00:50:07.500 So I think the work that you guys have done has been absolutely amazing.

00:50:10.680 I'm afraid we're just about to run out of time.

00:50:13.420 I feel like this is something we could talk about more.

00:50:15.240 and actually maybe could we pencil in

00:50:17.120 that when the website is launched

00:50:19.200 that we get you back on to talk about it more

00:50:21.360 maybe in more detail there

00:50:22.980 because I know we'll have loads of listeners

00:50:25.120 that will be very very keen to see the new version

00:50:28.320 and to interact with that

00:50:29.800 and use that with their own research

00:50:31.040 so thank you so much Julia and Ewan and Ruby

00:50:33.600 it's been really really nice having you on

00:50:35.380 this is um is a bit of a bonus diversion right it's not strictly about witches but it's about

00:50:48.820 something that we have talked a great deal about in different ways over the years and it features

00:50:54.680 somebody that we met on twitter that we thought he'd make a great guest so our guest today is

00:50:59.600 Christoph Smyers who's a postdoctoral fellow at the Roosbrook Institute which I know I will have

00:51:05.860 just mangled the pronunciation of that at the University of Antwerp. His research interests

00:51:10.780 are magic the supernatural and the occult and their connections to the histories of religion

00:51:14.860 science and folklore as well as their historiography and their archive history. Christoph's a really

00:51:20.280 great guest actually and we need to get him back on again but I'm not I'm not sure under what kind

00:51:26.520 of what auspice because it's not really about witches but anyway wait but so zoe would you

00:51:32.220 like to reveal what we're going to be talking about or should we let christoph explain that

00:51:37.140 himself i think we should just let christoph take away because he's the expert on these particular

00:51:41.760 entities our expert today i'll let you tell you a little bit what his research area is

00:51:51.880 but it's Christoph Smyers.

00:51:53.400 Am I saying that correctly, first of all, Christoph?

00:51:55.780 It's perfectly acceptable.

00:51:57.780 Oh, that sounds like it's wrong in your being.

00:51:59.200 No, no, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah, it's good.

00:52:00.980 How do you say your name?

00:52:02.460 I've heard a lot of words. It's Christoph Smyers.

00:52:04.760 Smyers, usually.

00:52:06.040 That's right.

00:52:07.520 I know I like to get people's names right, at least the first time,

00:52:09.880 and then just try really hard after that.

00:52:12.140 Christoph, thank you so much for coming on and talking to us.

00:52:15.280 Like quite a lot of our guests,

00:52:17.240 we sort of came across what you were doing because of Twitter.

00:52:20.100 I think that's maybe going to change as things go on, unfortunately.

00:52:23.420 But it's been a rich area for us so far.

00:52:25.540 And that's certainly where I first found out about the work you do.

00:52:28.400 So would you mind telling us a wee bit about what it is that you do, please?

00:52:33.440 Well, I'm a historian of what you could call the supernatural in the 19th and the 20th century.

00:52:39.160 So I look at spooky stuff, mostly for personal, but also for personal reasons.

00:52:46.000 As it turns out, it becomes something psychoanalytical along the way.

00:52:49.020 But it's also just because that's my job at the University of Antwerp and now at the University of Leuven, which is also here in Belgium, where I am.

00:52:56.760 Very exciting. And you've written a book about Ravens.

00:53:02.980 Yeah, that was it wasn't my professional go to.

00:53:07.500 It was something I did during COVID also because of Twitter, in a way, where there was some academics who were setting up a Twitter bestiary, I guess you could call it.

00:53:16.280 where we all took a letter

00:53:18.900 of the alphabet for

00:53:20.260 ourselves and

00:53:21.960 dedicated it to an animal and then tweeted about

00:53:24.840 the history of that animal as much as we could

00:53:26.500 and I just happened to have the letter R

00:53:28.780 That's amazing

00:53:30.440 So it wasn't something you had a thing for

00:53:32.720 No, well

00:53:34.640 it was pure luck and then a publisher

00:53:36.740 read the thread I wrote

00:53:38.780 about ravens and said, do you want to write a book

00:53:40.860 about ravens?

00:53:42.760 Did you have enough

00:53:43.580 to write about ravens?

00:53:46.280 no i don't i didn't really know that much about ravens to be honest um it's a bit like you i had

00:53:53.080 a fascination for them yeah something there was a personal bond there with that particular animal

00:53:58.120 i think maybe the difference between you and me is that i don't know anything about it whatsoever

00:54:03.260 and just really like the fact that they're these just amazing looking black birds i really genuinely

00:54:08.620 know very little about them at all and i'm sort of okay with that i just really like the way that

00:54:14.000 they move around through the world however the very first thing that is very obvious to me is

00:54:18.360 that claire asked you a very good question before we started to record what was your question there

00:54:22.820 my question was born of a born of an expression that zoe said which was ravens or i suppose in

00:54:31.560 scotland crows and then i was like hang on are ravens crows the same thing i thought i didn't

00:54:37.920 i didn't mean that ravens are crows in scotland i was saying i'm not sure if we've got ravens

00:54:42.460 it's crows that I see all the time

00:54:44.440 because I know that crows aren't as big

00:54:46.560 as ravens, well I think I know that

00:54:48.260 maybe that's not true also though

00:54:49.800 perhaps our expert could weigh in

00:54:52.040 well you do have ravens in Scotland

00:54:55.880 not where I live

00:54:57.340 well I don't know where you live

00:54:59.660 but there are

00:55:00.580 ravens have always been around

00:55:02.720 but England hasn't had ravens in a long time

00:55:05.660 apart from around the tower

00:55:07.680 also Scotland has ravens

00:55:10.680 but England doesn't

00:55:12.120 Yeah, England has been successful in eradicating ravens.

00:55:17.420 On purpose?

00:55:18.300 Why would you want to?

00:55:19.220 On purpose, yeah, as most of continental Europe has done,

00:55:22.660 which is also part of the reason I wrote this book,

00:55:24.700 is because only a couple of years ago, ravens came back to Belgium

00:55:27.480 and started making nests again, and I was immediately fascinated by that.

00:55:33.140 Why do people not want ravens?

00:55:36.020 Is it because they're goths?

00:55:38.520 No one likes goths.

00:55:40.500 I'm a goth.

00:55:41.260 years ago it's partly because they've been seen as pests from at least the early middle ages

00:55:50.380 and you know they were they were being generally horrible to farmers um but it's mostly also

00:55:56.500 because of all kinds of associations with the devil with witchcraft with the occult

00:56:01.000 with bad luck um ravens are often omens of misfortune um bad weather fall of civilization

00:56:09.640 those kinds of things

00:56:10.580 but it makes so much sense

00:56:12.440 that they're picked often as a familiar

00:56:15.320 by witches well in theory

00:56:17.580 they're accused of being witches familiars

00:56:19.760 and that they're definitely seen as being

00:56:21.480 in league with witches and the devil

00:56:23.480 and like bad stuff

00:56:25.420 there are cases of

00:56:27.560 witchcraft accusations where

00:56:29.060 the main argument for the accusation is that

00:56:31.500 the person in question

00:56:33.320 lived close to a raven's nest

00:56:35.160 I mean that's

00:56:38.100 that's it you're just living next living near to a raven might have got you accused

00:56:42.480 so can i can i ask a very basic and boring question about ravens but and zoe you shouldn't

00:56:49.800 need to know this because apparently you've been training them for years she's been she'd been

00:56:53.840 lying to us i think okay christoph hasn't listened to the podcast so he doesn't know about this

00:56:58.840 ongoing nonsense about me training ravens and raccoons i'm not a total lunatic christoph i'm

00:57:04.420 aware of the fact that it's made up i'm not delusional or psychotic it just helped get us

00:57:09.060 through lockdown i think just think see if christophe had chosen r for raccoons we could

00:57:16.480 be having a whole different sort of show maybe that's a thing for him to do anyway carry on

00:57:21.600 okay so my question is this how does one identify a raven and in particular how does one identify

00:57:31.940 by a raven when you think you might also be looking at a crow the main problem i've encountered after

00:57:39.740 writing this book is that people keep asking me is this a raven is this a crow and usually the

00:57:44.780 picture is some you see a black bird somewhere far away quite blurry and i just kind of have to

00:57:50.580 guess a little bit but generally if you get close enough it's it's pretty obvious a raven tends to

00:57:56.660 be almost twice the size of a crow and a crow is a pretty big bird so when you think of a raven

00:58:02.060 you have to think of a bird the size of a good eagle yeah no yeah yeah it's crows that we mostly

00:58:10.260 see around like it's not ravens and i thought they were ravens for ages and then there was a woman

00:58:14.800 that i work with we have them all the time in our school playground i just think they're totally

00:58:18.060 amazing i love the fact that they hang out near adolescence i think that tells us something about

00:58:21.760 them as well but they're but they're there a lot and i said to one of my colleagues oh look at those

00:58:26.900 ravens she just looked at me and she just went they're crows

00:58:29.600 ravens don't tend to come too close no it's like they have some kind of cultural memory about what

00:58:37.740 we've tried to do to them yeah so i think that common crows that's maybe why i like them yeah

00:58:44.160 so why you said like a professional interest but you also said that you had a personal

00:58:53.640 fascination what what was your interest that you drew you to Ravens this is this is quite an

00:59:01.480 intimate uh confessional moment here but um don't if you don't feel you won't share it you don't

00:59:07.420 it's fine it's in the book as well so i exploited it for commercial purposes but it's as a teenager

00:59:15.860 when there were no ravens in belgium whatsoever there was a kind of bird sanctuary near the coast

00:59:21.060 and before you enter the bird sanctuary you also get to walk through a row of cages where they keep

00:59:26.140 some birds and one of those cages was a raven sitting it was a tiny cage you know concrete

00:59:33.720 rust disgusting and this raven made eye contact with me and it made a little whistling noise and

00:59:43.400 i sat down by the cage and i think i didn't leave for about an hour oh my goodness and the raven

00:59:50.180 well and i just i have to be careful who i tell this to because sometimes people make fun of it

00:59:55.920 but it felt like i was talking and made all these different kinds of noises because it's a very

01:00:00.620 versatile songbird it's a songbird effectively um and it played games with me so we played with

01:00:08.240 with sticks we played with stones we played some kind of communication game um and that stayed with

01:00:15.840 me a lot yeah i remember learning that those cages were gone and that the bird had died and i thought

01:00:21.860 that was very it was a very difficult moment actually oh because they're they're known for

01:00:27.520 being clever aren't they they're sort of i mean are are they clever it sounds like they are clever

01:00:32.280 birds and crows got a very big brain yeah yeah um very big brain and a very close well the nerves

01:00:40.860 are very closely connected so they've um they've got a very good memory they've got a very good

01:00:45.880 spatial memory but they've also got a what they call a social memory so they they recognize

01:00:50.640 people's faces um like on the level of the individual they they memorize behavior of people

01:00:58.700 and other species they invent games um and there's a they're very sociable birds so there's a lot of

01:01:05.720 i wouldn't call it a social hierarchy as such because that sounds like it's a like a rigid

01:01:10.700 structure but they are very um yeah very socially flexible i guess have you made the acquaintance

01:01:19.620 of any other ravens since then no you're one reason um no i don't know if i if i can

01:01:31.860 i don't know if i'm over it back to belgium you might you might come across one yeah i've walked

01:01:39.060 in the woods where they where they are and where they've built nests now and then every year there

01:01:44.100 are there's always a couple of eggs uh coming out so the population is growing um and you're

01:01:50.500 saying that they're big like big like the size of say like a toddler

01:01:57.140 no maybe not a toddler um like a one-year-old one-year-old yeah like a one-year-old i'm just

01:02:05.540 hang on yeah that's pretty big that love that fact

01:02:10.420 when they split their wings it's quite a quite a daunting sight

01:02:15.360 there i just think they're really amazing i don't know why everybody doesn't sort of worship

01:02:20.760 ravens and crows there i know i'm just going to keep lumping crows in with ravens because to me

01:02:26.000 they're they're not the same thing but they're equally as amazing just they're they're so

01:02:30.080 beautiful i just think their their faces and their beaks and the color of them the depth of the color

01:02:36.280 of them it's wrong with there's so many different shades of black on a raven which is very impressive

01:02:42.860 and also like you say that the shape of the beak is something that you can recognize a raven from

01:02:48.080 as well because it's really shaped like a hammer and that's how they use it as well so they're

01:02:52.920 incredibly strong birds it's just a kilo and a half of muscle and feathers really because you

01:03:00.400 need to have quite a lot of muscle to keep that up in the air yeah they use these hammer beaks

01:03:06.240 when um for example in the far north where there is solid ice they can hammer their way through ice

01:03:13.000 just using their beak and do you think their association with like evil and that sort of thing

01:03:20.260 is purely because of their colour and their size,

01:03:25.120 you know, that they just look kind of intimidating

01:03:26.840 and people have got a connotation of, you know, the devil

01:03:30.080 and, you know, the man in black and all that sort of thing.

01:03:33.820 I think that was the most surprising thing,

01:03:36.400 that the explanation is that it's almost that simple.

01:03:39.700 Yeah, the blackness of the bird and the size of it

01:03:42.900 and the sounds that we associate with ravens

01:03:45.860 and their connotation with death as well.

01:03:49.180 so they're usually the first birds on a battlefield

01:03:51.720 once the battle's fought

01:03:53.540 so the elite

01:03:57.680 human flesh

01:03:58.560 yeah

01:03:59.780 listeners to the 0.94

01:04:03.860 podcast, Zoe just looked 0.92

01:04:05.460 even more excited by

01:04:07.560 that new information about

01:04:09.400 ravens

01:04:09.900 they're versatile

01:04:13.760 pragmatic

01:04:15.000 just off are ravens

01:04:17.840 the ones that if you build up relationships with you they'll bring you toys like they'll bring you

01:04:23.520 shiny things or pebbles they can do but crows can do that too um most most of that bird families

01:04:30.840 so the corvids i think you can build that kind of relationship with my dad had a friendship with

01:04:36.920 a magpie who would do something like that also love magpie just off are you are you you're perhaps

01:04:43.500 your father as well, like wizards

01:04:45.680 or sons of wizards

01:04:46.700 with familiars

01:04:49.780 of ravens and magpies

01:04:51.940 because magpies are also

01:04:53.720 associated, one for

01:04:55.840 sorrow, they're associated

01:04:57.900 with

01:04:58.620 sadness

01:05:00.740 well it's one for

01:05:03.780 sorrow, two for joy

01:05:05.060 I think three for a girl

01:05:07.560 four for a boy, that's not sneezes

01:05:09.580 is it? No, five for silver

01:05:11.680 six for gold seven for a secret never to be told that's amazing i love birds i i don't understand

01:05:18.380 why people don't like birds and a lot of people really don't like birds my mom's really scared of

01:05:23.160 them is it the flying i think it's the flying i think probably it's the film the birds partly 0.92

01:05:29.780 i think also she senses they wouldn't take any of her shit i feel that's part of the word 0.92

01:05:35.920 luckily my mum doesn't listen to our podcast so it's fine but um but i just those those birds 0.89

01:05:42.380 are all just really like i've never touched any of them obviously but when i see them i just have

01:05:48.760 this compulsion i've never i wouldn't try to do this but i would just really like to hold them

01:05:53.680 they just look like they're really satisfying hold there was a moment in the 19th century which

01:06:01.720 wasn't very long-lived where it was kind of fashionable for middle-class families to have

01:06:07.360 ravens as pets for that partly because of what you just described because it was people thought

01:06:13.060 it was fun to hold them and to have them you know fly around and do perform tricks you can teach

01:06:18.300 you can teach them to to talk a little bit so it's a party trick thing as well they call them

01:06:23.800 the poor man's parrot

01:06:25.100 I would definitely go for 0.52

01:06:31.720 a Raven any day over a parrot

01:06:33.680 absolutely 0.96

01:06:35.080 I think

01:06:36.720 yes it would

01:06:41.160 it would go with everything

01:06:42.300 I mean I'm not dressed in an all black style

01:06:45.720 but I usually am dressed completely in black as well

01:06:47.820 and I just think

01:06:48.560 there's no shedding

01:06:49.860 it's not problematic

01:06:51.680 Is there anywhere that still keeps ravens as pets, Christoph?

01:06:58.320 I'm wondering whether or not Scotland we should bring it back.

01:07:02.000 As pets, I'm not sure. 0.91

01:07:03.880 There's a reason it was not very long-lived as a fad.

01:07:06.780 It was because ravens are very clever and you couldn't contain them

01:07:10.960 and they tended to get very bored very quickly in the house,

01:07:14.220 which meant that they became a big pain.

01:07:18.360 There's a lot of cartoons in Dutch newspapers from the time

01:07:21.000 where you see the woman of the lady of the house

01:07:24.020 chasing the raven through the house

01:07:25.900 while it breaks everything.

01:07:29.300 What sort of period was that then?

01:07:32.080 That's late 19th century.

01:07:33.900 So, I mean, Charles Dickens had a pet raven.

01:07:36.320 Had pet ravens in his adult life.

01:07:38.280 He was a bit of an obsessive with ravens.

01:07:41.320 That makes a lot of sense, though, doesn't it?

01:07:44.120 You would think.

01:07:45.380 You would think it would be like an Alan Poe

01:07:47.580 that would have a raven, not Dickens.

01:07:49.680 uh yeah well Poe never had one as a pet was it was Arthur Conan Doyle didn't they

01:08:00.220 didn't didn't the two of them do sort of spiritualism together they had an interest

01:08:05.220 or was it Dickens debunked it and Conan Doyle was into it or the other way around

01:08:09.020 Doyle was into it definitely yeah there's like what happened was that um I think Dickens basically

01:08:16.660 had pat ravens most of his life and he liked them a lot and he used he used to push them into his

01:08:21.700 stories and poe read one of them and he wrote a review of one of the stories and said you could

01:08:26.780 do a lot more with ravens as characters and then he wrote the raven oh that's how it happened how

01:08:33.160 interesting but but poe never poe just like you you take all the hard work of the raven i'll just

01:08:40.660 write about it in a gothic way yeah i mean i would bird was chasing the children

01:08:47.680 oh well that's not so good is it wow on the children

01:08:52.220 you can tell the mother depends on the children um so during lockdown one of my friends rosemary

01:09:01.200 made friends with what i think is a raven might be a crow and she used to it used to come and

01:09:08.880 visit her every day and she used to feed it a local biscuits in Scotland called an Abernethy

01:09:15.020 biscuit and also pepperoni and this crow would it was a crow or a raven to be perfectly honest

01:09:22.340 it was a big it was a big big black bird but I wasn't quite sure as to how to identify it but

01:09:28.320 she sometimes like crows are quite big that's why I thought crows were ravens until my colleague

01:09:34.300 said to me that it wasn't because crows themselves they're not they're not little they're they are

01:09:37.880 quite goodly sized birds well i just i i very much enjoyed the fact that she'd befriended one

01:09:45.780 during the lockdown and it came to her every week every day but one way that we can work out if it

01:09:50.940 was a crow or a raven are ravens solitary birds like robins or do they bond and like like wood

01:09:59.560 pigeons do they have partners so they're they bond but one of the main differences between

01:10:05.880 crows and ravens is that crows tend to appear in group whereas ravens they they find a partner

01:10:13.220 they stay with the partner for the rest of their lives and then afterwards they also have a mourning

01:10:17.600 period if they become a widow or a widower they don't need to wear black so crows are more like

01:10:26.580 a kind of a sex cult type of a setup where they're just well i don't want to advertise it but maybe

01:10:33.480 that's we always think when i think of like birds that make for life i think of swans and wood

01:10:41.640 pigeons but we should really be pushing the raven i think the difficulty with ravens is they all

01:10:46.580 look identical so it might be difficult to work out if their boyfriend girlfriend or boyfriend

01:10:52.240 boyfriend girlfriend girlfriend once you get really into ravens though you can tell the

01:10:56.840 differences between individuals can you can you personally yeah they don't look all the same

01:11:02.660 no they all look black and they're all huge but they all you know in the way they walk the way

01:11:07.440 they talk the way they move did you have to like did you have to like investigate ravens

01:11:13.520 like how did you do your research what should we read about if we want to know more about ravens

01:11:18.480 if if you want the honest answer a lot of the research was watching youtube videos about

01:11:25.400 ravens doing funny tricks okay i like that modern research because you but but the way that the video

01:11:34.060 the way that we can learn about it is just by getting your book you've done all the hard work

01:11:38.640 for us yeah it's all there it's just you have to learn dutch for it because it's an english

01:11:44.000 what that's a probably said that at some point yeah but i i just generally right okay well we

01:11:53.820 have to find you um an english publisher surely gladly yeah there's enough goths in in in the uk

01:12:01.060 i mean like scotland if it has ravens surely there's a there's a group of people who want

01:12:06.900 to know about ravens i would think so and there are there is talk in england as well about

01:12:11.740 reintroducing ravens i don't want england to have ravens they can stay raven free i feel ravens are

01:12:19.420 more scottish i feel did you is that because scotland's like dark and dree and wintry and

01:12:27.740 therefore a raven would fit i mean you're not going to get many days of a raven sitting on a

01:12:31.920 like sunny beach or anything like that no no i don't think they would did did belgium have an

01:12:39.360 issue with witch trials and were so were ravens associated like distinctly with that as well in

01:12:46.560 belgium i haven't really come across ravens and those witch trials and also because i haven't

01:12:51.980 studied the witch trials as closely as i probably should have um but you did have it like a witch

01:12:57.360 trials period as well though yeah yeah it's the same period yeah yeah 16th and 17th century with

01:13:03.800 some some outliers in the 18th century and there are some illustrations from the 17th century in

01:13:09.860 um german states where the witchcraft trials were also happening where you you do see those

01:13:16.820 stereotypical images of the witch with her raven familiar yeah because i wonder what the what the

01:13:22.380 idea across europe and in fact across any culture that has witches which seems to most cultures

01:13:26.960 and the idea of familiars if that's something that all witch stories have have a tendency

01:13:32.780 towards familiars that there's the animal world is is tied in with the signing yourself across to

01:13:38.240 the devil side of things yeah because i know that the the database that um the university of edam's

01:13:44.060 put together about about the witch trials that they've got to organize where you can you can look

01:13:48.940 um one of the ways of organizing the materials is by familiars so you can see where familiars

01:13:54.160 were in different areas i need to look at that a bit more closely to see if geographically

01:13:58.380 there there are particular familiars for particular areas

01:14:02.040 i do wonder also to what extent the the idea of the raven as the favorite familiar is a 19th

01:14:10.400 century thing when it's been superimposed on the history and also when witchcraft becomes this or

01:14:18.300 is wrongly interpreted as this pagan um pagan religion from the past and ravens are a pagan

01:14:24.720 bird by yeah by definition almost because of the way they were the bird they were odin's birds

01:14:30.420 um there's this whole germanic thing going on with ravens and that's just kind of mashed up post

01:14:38.560 event in the way one of the things that we do with the podcast is sort of get different experts that

01:14:43.120 can come on and do kind of a myth busting and because obviously one of one of the biggest

01:14:47.860 issues with the with the witch trials is people's modern perception is that you know is that they

01:14:52.980 were they were healers and they were midwives and and that they were just pagans living their

01:14:57.740 herbal lives and that they you know that the man couldn't tolerate it and we know that obviously

01:15:02.320 that's not true but it's it's interesting yeah i wonder whether there's the idea of familiars it's

01:15:06.820 so it's so filmic isn't it it's so it's so bought into the culture of modern more modern day

01:15:14.120 interpretations of witches you wonder how important familiars were i'll need to do more research into

01:15:18.220 that because i do find that sorry no quite carry on um i'm also wondering to what extent familiars

01:15:25.400 were a regional thing i'm not sure if i've come across many belgian uh people accused of witchcraft

01:15:32.240 who were accused of having a familiar at all ah right okay that's interesting i know it's i know

01:15:37.500 it's it was popular in england yeah i think nation of animal lovers it was it was much more popular

01:15:45.340 in England than it was even up here in Scotland

01:15:47.280 eh Zoe? I think because we don't have

01:15:49.260 access to all that many interesting animals

01:15:51.360 maybe they do more in England 1.00

01:15:53.360 because it's Balmier 1.00

01:15:54.740 we've got ravens, we've got cats

01:15:57.680 oh I found

01:15:59.340 out, top, top news

01:16:00.720 I found out that in Scots you can

01:16:03.220 call an owl a hoolet

01:16:04.660 I saw that, yes, a hoolet 0.99

01:16:07.320 I like that 1.00

01:16:08.220 that made my day

01:16:09.920 what do you call owls in Belgium?

01:16:13.600 just owl, which is

01:16:15.020 It just sounds like you can't pronounce

01:16:16.760 an owl very well.

01:16:20.000 But owl did

01:16:20.940 just come, I know, sorry, we've now got off.

01:16:22.960 Owls are my favourite birds

01:16:24.720 because they can 0.93

01:16:26.840 turn their head almost right round.

01:16:28.860 And then that

01:16:30.820 spoiled it for me when I discovered that, that owls

01:16:32.960 actually can't turn it the whole way.

01:16:34.880 I was like, yeah, I mean, that's quite cool,

01:16:36.840 but it's not as cool as actually the whole way

01:16:38.920 around. And have you seen a wet owl?

01:16:42.600 Yeah.

01:16:42.960 They've got very skinny

01:16:44.780 legs. I just don't feel

01:16:46.620 ravens would be like that if they were wet.

01:16:48.560 They'd still be muscular. 0.80

01:16:53.080 If any of

01:16:54.620 our listeners wanted to

01:16:56.520 befriend a raven, Christophe,

01:16:59.940 how would you go about

01:17:00.800 that? Hashtag asking for a friend.

01:17:04.620 Well,

01:17:04.820 I should have to move to a place where there are plenty

01:17:06.740 of ravens about. Okay, tick. We're in

01:17:08.800 Scotland. Carry on. I think

01:17:10.700 dressing in black is a good start, always. 0.78

01:17:12.920 Okay. Also tick.

01:17:14.780 you've got you've got that maybe carry a piece of cheese they tend to like cheese oh my god

01:17:20.740 would they be scared by my very white hair i didn't think so

01:17:32.180 you know i was i had long floppy hair as a teenager and that raven wasn't scared so

01:17:39.540 okay it didn't put it didn't put that that raven was very much though unable to choose very much

01:17:48.300 given the fact that he was already in a cage true i think his wings were clipped as well

01:17:52.500 oh quite literally i'm talking about if you were wanting to woo a raven in the wild what you might

01:17:58.260 do so basically hang around in black cheese i mean i've been hanging around in black with cheese now

01:18:04.780 for over 50 years and no ravens have

01:18:06.740 approached. Is there anything? Have you been

01:18:08.660 holding cheese out towards ravens?

01:18:11.680 No, of course I've not.

01:18:12.620 I've been holding it towards my mouth.

01:18:15.040 Right, because that's not going to work.

01:18:16.940 I think that's a problem. Yeah.

01:18:18.840 Need to make the cheese available.

01:18:21.120 I see. More available.

01:18:22.520 I see. Okay. I'll maybe make

01:18:24.580 a necklace of cheese or something like that

01:18:26.820 so I can just pluck a handy

01:18:28.520 piece of cheese off.

01:18:30.340 I think we're going to have to make this our Christmas special.

01:18:34.780 we can definitely seg with that with cheese boards i think possibly oh nice is there is

01:18:41.860 there anything that you think that people should know about ravens that could turn the kind of

01:18:47.200 their negative pr around like what would be a top thing that you'd say to people i don't know if

01:18:54.280 they still have as much negative pr as as they used to i think people are generally quite appreciative 0.99

01:18:59.900 of the blackness now

01:19:01.320 I mean if there's one misunderstanding

01:19:03.940 that was historically

01:19:06.040 very persistent and that I think most people

01:19:08.100 wouldn't believe now anyway

01:19:09.760 is that it won't eat your

01:19:12.120 children, ravens won't go for your children

01:19:14.280 they won't

01:19:15.560 which was the thing that people feared

01:19:17.100 just maybe because

01:19:20.080 of their size and because they might 0.63

01:19:22.120 like steal small rodents

01:19:24.180 and stuff

01:19:24.860 I mean they steal your dog

01:19:28.220 if you have a small dog

01:19:29.660 I do have a small dog

01:19:32.440 I now see a fly in the ointment of my

01:19:34.680 idea for it, I've got a dog that

01:19:36.760 weighs four kilos, it wouldn't last long

01:19:38.760 would it?

01:19:39.820 I think they can just go and pick it up

01:19:42.500 and fly off with it but

01:19:43.660 I'm not sure they would

01:19:46.140 I know that when they reintroduced

01:19:51.040 is it sea eagles

01:19:52.440 to Scotland, there's

01:19:54.100 some, maybe two, maybe there's more than that

01:19:56.740 I don't know, as ever

01:19:58.040 i've got all the details at my fingertips but they reintroduced sea eagles i think claire is

01:20:02.880 this ringing a bell with you at all no yes yes and i think that the argument that people made

01:20:09.060 one of the two arguments i think the first one was that they would attack sheep and the second

01:20:13.680 one was that they would carry your toddler away yeah i don't think any toddlers

01:20:18.580 those things about ravens here once they reappeared and they're definitely being said

01:20:24.920 about wolves now that wolves have come back as well are you going to do about a book about wolves as

01:20:29.440 well it came out two weeks ago what really oh my god tell us more about wolves we've only got a

01:20:36.920 few minutes left but tell us about wolves and you consider doing raccoons as well just that's

01:20:45.800 other animal of choice i hate to disappoint you but i will probably not write a book about

01:20:51.200 raccoons that's okay i can understand they're not in the same order as like ravens and wolves like

01:20:56.600 raccoons maybe animals owls may be clear but i get it about raccoons it'll be a very short book

01:21:03.760 it'll just be like you're like little burglars that'd be my entire but um but wolves though

01:21:10.800 are wolves then definitely seen in belgium in the same way that i think people in scotland would

01:21:15.580 which is that they shouldn't be reintroduced and that they're dangerous and that they would kill

01:21:19.420 your children and your sheep what yes but also you that discussion was never really had here

01:21:25.460 until wolves just walked back in whereas that wouldn't happen in scotland i don't think

01:21:29.540 wolves just walked back into belgium yeah there's no reintroduction is the wrong word

01:21:35.220 they were introduced themselves so they just walked back in where did they walk back in from

01:21:40.460 like they didn't go off a plane well there's a bunch of conspiracy theories about this as well

01:21:46.240 but we can track

01:21:48.140 their trajectory and they've

01:21:50.140 walked through Poland into

01:21:52.080 Germany and then through, well basically

01:21:54.020 we're in Belgium and then they decided to make

01:21:56.160 a home here. Oh you must

01:21:58.100 have a welcoming place

01:22:00.020 No not at all

01:22:01.840 we're awful people

01:22:03.100 Is there an abundance of toddlers

01:22:06.280 and lambs?

01:22:08.280 There used to be

01:22:08.940 We've gone to a very very dark place

01:22:14.080 Our time is going to run out

01:22:15.820 is maybe just as well

01:22:16.740 because obviously I work with children 1.00

01:22:18.160 and Claire's upholding the law 1.00

01:22:19.380 so we maybe better just stop this convo

01:22:20.980 but Christoph I'm sorry that you've been

01:22:23.720 you've been inflicted

01:22:25.080 absolute nonsense with this

01:22:28.300 but I remain a firm fan

01:22:30.600 of the raven

01:22:31.440 and they're slightly lesser in some ways

01:22:34.220 pal the crow

01:22:35.120 and I'm so proud that Scotland has ravens

01:22:37.420 and England doesn't

01:22:39.120 let's keep it that way

01:22:40.900 and Christoph I will still try

01:22:43.800 to romance a crow

01:22:45.720 or a raven and i'll keep you updated with my with my keys necklace to see how that goes

01:22:51.560 i wish you the best of luck thank you so much we'll share the details up for any any people

01:22:58.360 that speak your language we need to find a scottish scottish publisher for ravens and for

01:23:03.460 the wolf book as well um maybe we should get you back on is there some way we can link wolves with

01:23:07.880 witches of course yeah yeah always well thank you so much we're about to cut out it's been really

01:23:15.240 really nice meeting you we'll see you later thank you very much for inviting me thank you

01:23:20.900 well thank you very much for joining us today for this the first podcast of 2024

01:23:31.560 what number is it Claire I forgot to say that so wait we should have said at the beginning

01:23:38.580 what number it was and as you should well know she says 8 million I think it's episode 71

01:23:48.680 71 no no I say I think it's episode 71 it's probably best if I check that

01:23:55.720 yes it might be episode 71 I have checked it and it is episode 71 excellent so thank you for

01:24:03.160 joining us for episode 71 it's quite good that it's a one at the beginning of the year quite like

01:24:08.880 that it's it's been a pleasure to have you here listening to us um warbling as usual please get

01:24:14.620 in touch with us on facebook and on twitter and we look forward to hearing different things that

01:24:20.140 are going on around the world with your own work on memorializing and researching bye

01:24:26.060 if you'd like to learn more about the witches of scotland please subscribe wherever you get

01:24:36.380 your podcasts sign up for our mailing list at www.witchesofscotland.com to keep updated with

01:24:44.500 the campaign on that site you'll be able to find how to link with us on twitter facebook and instagram

01:24:56.060 Amen.

Witches of Scotland - March 02, 2024

EPISODE 71 - THE SURVEY OF SCOTTISH WITCHCRAFT WITH PROG GOODARE, EUAN MCANDREW & RUBY IMRIE

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