- Location: Wigtown, DG8 9HU
- Access: Parking in town
- Opening times: 24 hours
- Entry: No charge
The Killing Time, a period of conflict between government forces and members of the Presbyterian Covenanter movement, which rejected the king as head of the church, lasted approximately ten years from about 1679. During that time, an estimated 18,000 Covenanters died for their faith, and many monuments to their martyrdom can be found all over Scotland.
One of the most appalling incidents during this time was the executions of the five people that became known as the Wigtown Martyrs. Three men – William Johnston, John Milroy, and George Walker – were sent to the gallows, but two women, 63-year-old widow Margaret MacLauchlan (also known as McLachlan) and 18-year-old Margaret Wilson, were subjected to death by drowning. On 11 May 1685, they were tied to stakes where the River Bladnoch meets the Cree estuary in the Solway Firth, and left to watch the tide coming in. Margaret MacLauchlin was placed further out than Margaret Wilson in the hope that the younger woman might renounce her faith upon witnessing the fate of her companion, but she refused, and is reputed to have sung psalms as the water level grew ever higher. Wilson’s 13-year-old sister Agnes was also arrested at the time but was reprieved when her father paid a bond of £100, a sum that left him financially stricken and unable to save his oldest daughter.
There are several monuments to the Wigtown Martyrs in the town, including their graves in the railed enclosure in the kirkyard and an obelisk on Windy Hill, but the most striking is the Martyr’s Stake, a stone pillar near the site where the two women died. The vista may be beautiful on a good day, yet there is still an appropriate sense of desolation; in poor weather, the site is simply grim.
Presumably because of her age and therefore perceived beauty, Margaret Wilson became something of a heroine to the Victorian arts world, being immortalised in oils by both John Everett Millais and John William Waterhouse and commemorated in marble by Handyside Ritchie in a monument in Stirling’s Old Cemetery. In this last named, a guardian angel, looking ashamed by its conspicuous absence on that dreadful day in May 1685, watches over Margaret as she reads the Bible to Agnes. Also conspicuously absent in all these artworks is Margaret MacLauchlan, a victim of apparent ageism as well as martyrdom.
Destination or Diversion?
The Martyr’s Stake is merely a diversion, but one worth visiting should you attend the Wigtown Book Festival, which runs every autumn, usually late September to early October, and is now Scotland’s second largest book festival after Edinburgh.