This book is a DIY guide to the wonderful world of the Scottish witch. It is full of spells, ancient lore and vanished magic but underneath, always, it is full of the most surprising realities. Some discoveries explored in the following pages are as plain as a pikestaff; others are still only shadowy suggestions, the starting-point for much more work. As far as possible in a single volume, this volume provides a mound of material in which to mine for gold. Some of these new ideas are proven by the author 'beyond reasonable doubt'. The historical equivalence of witches with the imaginary, pervasive Scottish 'fairies' is demonstrated. A more contentious perception is that the archaic Gaelic of witches' testimonies in witch trials was the source of much confusion and creative invention. Often English recording clerks and other writers who spoke only English struggled at the 'clerical interface' to interpret what was being said in Ancient Gaelic. Some nonsensical magical belief seem to have arisen from clerks, with no Gaelic, asking questions of the illiterate witch, who had little or no English. The clerk makes his record in English, garbling the original Gaelic into phonetic English. By unpicking the weave of such mis-translations in Scottish witch trial records, the author shows, for example, how an original hunting metaphor meaning 'as fast as possible' was misinterpreted as evidence that witches flew by night to their meetings. Where we find such 'supernatural' nonsense in the records, it may not, after all, have been the stuff of dreams and nightmares, but more prosaically a record of misconstrued Gaelic replies to questions barely understood by the witches on trial. This book is dedicated to the pagan healers, midwives, wise women and wise men of Scotland, put to death by ignorant and prejudiced men in the years following the Reformation. Their crime was to observe their old folk religion, a benign faith that made their lives endurable. The book is written to perpetuate the memory of the deer-hunters, among the first victims of intolerance in modern times.