I was excited to read this exploration of Scotland and witchcraft, and I enjoyed some of the lovely, evocative description of the countryside.

There was a lot about the writer's own life, that I think was supposed to sit well alongside the discussion of the women memorialised. However, this jarred for me and I wanted to read much more in-depth detail of some of these women.

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

An almost poetic account of the persecution of women during the Scottish Witch Trials, Ashes and Stones is a Journey around our country while also giving an insight into the lives of these women who suffered at the hands of a zealous, narrow minded patriarchy.

An enjoyable read, well written and entertaining. Hadn't read this author before but would consider reading again.

A lovely written book, I definitely learnt a lot in this non fiction book and found is extremely interesting. I recommend this.

This was a fascinating and enlightening recount of the witch hunts and trials that occurred in Scotland in the seventeenth century. It is nice blend of historical fiction, personal anecdotes and factual accounts. However I felt that during the journey I wanted to linger in some places and maybe not continue to the next.

Ashes and Stones is beautifully written look at the treatment of women accused of witchcraft in Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries, woven alongside the memoir of the author and how the lives of the women feel reflected in their own life.

Allyson Shaw, from the US but part of the Scottish diaspora manages to weave together a beautiful narrative by mixing the search for heritage, both in blood and bond, with the painful memories of the treatment of women in the past. Rather than following the typical narrative of sensationalising the reasons why the women accused of witchcraft were accused, she instead focuses on the circumstances surrounding it. Much of witchcraft popular writing tends towards a want to theorise that maybe these women were witches, or had done something to make others think they really were. As a historian who studied witchcraft as part of her course, it was wonderful to see Shaw mention several of the witchcraft scholars that I was familiar with and had read throughout my studies. My conclusions from the course were similar to Shaw: these women weren't witches in any way. They were just women.

Shaw's prose is easily read, and with the personal story alongside, makes for a thoroughly enjoyable, and relatable read. Within my own historical writing I also focused on connecting with the past, and seeing how much of it could be reflected in my own life. Being able to relate to history is one of the best ways to understand history, and to understand its continued relevance in today's society.

I would highly recommend this book, not just to those interested in witch trials, but anyone interested in history and the history of women.

A big thank you to NetGalley and to Hodder & Stoughton for giving me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Allyson Shaw's book is a beautifully written investigation of the treatment of women in Scotland during the 17th and 18th century. Shaw's lyrical phrasing untangles the myths and limited historical findings of this period, shedding light on the cruel treatment of (mostly) women accused of witchcraft by men in positions of power. The author's personal connection to this history adds a layer of emotion and authenticity to her writing, making it a tribute to those who suffered before her.

Shaw's attention to detail and careful research make the historical setting of the book come to life, providing us readers with a deeper understanding of the cultural and social environment in which these prejudices occurred. Despite the subject matter, Shaw's writing style is engaging and accessible, striking a balance between providing enough historical context and keeping the narrative flowing.

The book also touches on the broader implications of witch trials and persecution of women. The writings helps us connect this history to present-day issues such as gender inequality and violence against women, making the book both timely and relevant.

Overall, this book provides a poignant look at a ‘fashionable’ subject matter which includes moments in Scottish history. Although it may have been written with a specific target audience in mind, anyone interested in history, social justice, or the experiences of women throughout history would find it to be a valuable read.

I would like to thank #NetGalley and #hodderandstoughton for the opportunity of reading this advanced copy of #AshesandStones in exchange for my own honest review.

This book was due for release on January 19th, 2023.

An evocative and sometimes harrowing journey in search of those accused of witchcraft in 17th C. This very personal account is very tied to the landscape and the overall effect was both fascinating and poignant.

A truly intense but none the less intriguing read , I had over the years heard some things about the awful Witch Hunts ,Torture & final erasement of the Women & some Men accused & tried of being Witches.in Scotland . But the true scale of those events is almost mind blowing , especially when you consider that many of those accused & killed were just Midwives, Healers of that age ,but ultimately I believe as in all of History it was & is still in many countries around the world Man's fear of Women's strength , interlect that leads to these awful events , plus their perverse sexual desires too.#NetGalley, #GoodReads,#FB, #Amazon.co.uk, #Instagram, #<img src="https://www.netgalley.com/badge/358a5cecda71b11036ec19d9f7bf5c96d13e2c55" width="80" height="80" alt="100 Book Reviews" title="100 Book Reviews"/>, #<img src="https://www.netgalley.com/badge/ef856e6ce35e6d2d729539aa1808a5fb4326a415" width="80" height="80" alt="Reviews Published" title="Reviews Published"/>, #<img src="https://www.netgalley.com/badge/aa60c7e77cc330186f26ea1f647542df8af8326a" width="80" height="80" alt="Professional Reader" title="Professional Reader"/>, also this is not Bedtime reading Material !

This book was incredible, really. I don't know what I expected upon picking it up, I was merely drawn by the brief description of the wild scottish countryside but this book is everything. It's a call to action for womxn's rights, it's an acknowledgement of brutality that women have suffered and it's a lesson for the future. I loved it.

I was lucky to get an ebook ARC of Ashes & Stones by Allyson Shaw to read recently. Thank you to the author, #netgalley and @hodderstoughton for approving this.

This book is a fascinating read and one that is quite hard to categorise. Though non-fiction it also is a memoir of Allyson's journey to a remote Scottish village and her fascinating research and discoveries of the Scottish Witch Trials, Witches monuments, gardens and folklore and myths that have accurately or inaccurately been passed on through the ages.

I would say this is certainly not an easy read, especially as a female, as the horrors and injustices faced by these women are unearthed. The writing style and prose are so beautiful that I sometimes felt I was reading a work of fiction and I was brought back to earth with the uncomfortable realisation that these events and horrors were all too common.

The depth of research is fascinating and I think anyone reading will only be encouraged to investigate more into this aspect of history that is not spoken about enough.

A fabulous piece of non-fiction that I would highly recommend to anyone with even a slight interest in Witch trials, folklore, mythology, history, monuments and life in Scotland throughout the ages with regard to women classed as witches due to fitting outside the class norms of the period.

“I claim the denomination hedge witch and all the unbounded mysteries that implies: a liminal thinker, someone open to the edges where other ways of knowing seep in. Those of us who identify as witches are feminist tricksters, myth-makers and storytellers in search of a history.”

My thanks to Hodder & Stoughton Sceptre for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘Ashes & Stones’ by Allyson Shaw. I complemented my reading with its unabridged audiobook edition, narrated by Lucy Paterson.

This book is subtitled ‘A Scottish Journey in Search of Witches and Witness’ and is a combination of a personal/travel memoir and an examination of the history and legacy of the Scottish witch trials.

Shaw writes of the sense of displacement she felt living in the USA that drew her to emigrate to Britain, eventually settling in Scotland.

She sought to understand the witch trials and undertook a personal journey to various sites. Alongside the historical, religious, and political factors that lead to the trials, Shaw also writes extensively of Scottish faerie and folk lore.

This was a marvellous book that drew me into Shaw’s journey. I was especially moved by her sense of connection with the land. She writes: “here I am, a daughter returned to Scotland. Like many Americans with a Scottish surname and a story of ancestry, Scotland is also a metaphorical home, a place where I seed dreams of belonging.”

This was something that I experienced and led me to return to Britain, where I was born yet not raised. So I can attest to how powerful that ancestral bond can be.

Overall, ‘Ashes & Stones’ was an inspiring, beautifully written book, rich in descriptions of the Scottish landscape and powerful accounts of those who were victims of these trials. It concludes with a glossary and bibliography.

On a side note, I found the cover image by Iain Macarthur very striking and felt that it conveyed a subtle sense of the book’s subject matter.

Highly recommended.

This was a truly eye opening book of research into the many years of Scottish witch trials and the horrendous treatment dished out to so many, over so many years.

As the author visits each area to learn more about the women she has researched, you really feel her connection with the areas and their stories. She gives these women their voices all these years later, and hearing about their treatment and trials was truly astonishing. I always am fascinated by the stories of witch trials from all over the world, and focussing on the Scottish ones was a brilliant way to get a sense of the history and poor treatment that was the norm for so long. And by naming the women, it made it even more powerful as you really got a sense of the character and the insanity of the whole movement.

There's reports of the trial confessions, alongside the torture that led to some of these confessions - it often reads like fiction but it is so scary to think that these things actually happened to these women! It looks in to the history of the time, the reformation of religion, the misogyny, paranoia and power that men had over women and it really adds

Hearing the authors' own story also added to the enjoyment as you felt like she was finding herself as she went along to each different area, and the memories and feelings it brought up about her own past and why she felt that these women needed to be remembered - and quite rightly so!! A powerful and illuminating read!

This is a beautiful, poignant and heart-breaking book that is about two journeys.

One is a journey to find the Scottish Witches who were accused, convicted and killed in staggering numbers and who are now mostly forgotten or even worse, remembered for the wrong reasons, their history dismissively mis-told.

The second is a personal journey by the author, the book also a memoir of sorts that adds a beautifully personal touch, making this more than just an historical fact book and more a logging of personal details, emotional feelings towards the history she is searching for and, I think, finding a part of herself in amongst the named but face less women she writes so wonderfully about.

I really enjoyed reading this book, despite the horrific subject that it is based upon, the author is someone I have followed for a while on Instagram and I think she has done a fantastic, touching job of writing this book dedicated to the Witches of Scotland.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for a chance to read this ARC.

Across the beautiful landscape of glorious highlands and serene lochs, Scotland is a country that is a host to many dark, many unforgivable histories.

Allyson Shaw leads us to a compelling tale of a journey across Scotland while visiting the memorials of so-called "witches" or the scenes of witch trials while discussing the history of those innocents unjustly murdered through misogyny and deep-rooted superstition.

While tackling themes such as personal identity, religious extremism and the confrontation of the dark injustices of our historical past head on, Shaw has created an unflinching account told with deep sincerity, always keeping the victims to the forefront of our minds.

Written with such poignancy and endurance, the book is authentic and unromantic as it details the horrific events of the witch-hunts across Scotland made even more real as the author stands before the memorials such as stones, mazes or sculptures, forcing the reader to confront the heartbreaking truths that claimed so many innocent lives.

I have always been fascinated by the history of the witch trials, but Shaw's book has to be one of the most thought-provoking, most human-centred accounts to have been written. It is a book that will stay with me for a very long time indeed.

Thank you to @sceptrebooks @hodderbooks and @netgalley for allowing me an advanced copy of this book.

I picked up Ashes and Stones just after finishing Kirsty Logan's new novel, Now She Is Witch, so it was nice to get the non-fiction version after reading a fiction on the same subject. Both share an emphasis on the theme of storytelling and, like Kirsty Logan’s novel, Ashes and Stones starts by reminding the reader that women who were burnt at the stake were not self-proclaimed witches – not even healers in most cases. Organising her book around her visits to Scottish landmarks that serve as perpetual reminders of the witch hunts, the author shows through the fates of Lillias Adie, Agnes Sampson and Grissell Jaffray among others, that these mass killings were overwhelmingly aimed at women who lived with a certain degree of autonomy, in one way or another. A beautiful tribute to women whose names should never be forgotten.

This was a good historical non-fiction for me as being from Scotland I knew of all the places which the author has mentioned and described. I found this book after watching Outlander and that is what drew me into reading it as it helped me understand the way that characters in the fictional story were treated in line with the history of the times.

I did find this a hard read at times and found myself having to google some of the things to get a visual representation of some of the items which were described and this would be the thing which I would have found the most useful would have been having pictures of some of the items to help my understanding of the subjects/items being described to develop the history.

A totally engrossing yet moving story of witches in Scotland. Hard to read in places but none the less fascinating

"When shall we three meet again, In thunder and in rain" - so begins Act 1 of Shakespeare's play 'Macbeth'. This is my favourite play an various adaptations have fascinated me.
This superbly written factual book explores the witches and of course the true Macbeth story. How even still modern interpretations are fascinated with these women so often killed (murdered) in the name of fear and male dominance in the land.
The author reveals her own life through the chapters and has had a fascination for witchcraft since childhood. Now having moved to Scotland in Banff she is in the heart of the major witch hunts which occurred in the late 1500s through the early 1600s.
Under King James I who wrote his tome 'Demonologie' in 1597 those in charge felt vindicated to seek out these weird women who communities and particularly the church felt were witches and corrupting the parish.
Following paths across Scotland to sites of execution, then to often overgrown graves and memorials we feel the fog and wet foliage seep into our own bones. I never knew I was a Taphophile -a tombstone tourist - but am glad to share it with the author and discover what friends often think is a weird sightseeing need to seek out churchyards and gravestones.
Of course these witch hunts were not isolated to Scotland, although from reading the book it appears a huge concentration of 'trials' and executions took place. Often these women were also local midwives and dispensers of medicine which of course confused their necessary work against a supposed (often male)fear they were concocting 'devil worship' spells.
We seem to be in a phase of fiction aligned to witches - some of it verging I feel on misogynist lines- so this is a valuable book to equal out the fact from the fiction.
It evokes the atmosphere and brings the real women to life as real people often misjudged and found guilty. May we continue to question this part of history and remember with respect those whose lives have been extinguished with terror and misunderstanding.

DNF at 40%

I really tried to enjoy this book, I simply think I was not the target audience for it.

Ashes & Stones recounts the lives of witches trialled in Scotland, giving details of the few historical accounts that are still with us while musing about how we decide to remember the past, and how it reflects on current socio-political affairs.

The premise was interesting enough, asking what it means to belong to a place, and where we can find our roots when we feel like we don’t belong anywhere.

I enjoyed how detailed the author was in her notes and descriptions of the places she visited, it definitely makes you re-think the places we live in and their secret histories. It would make a very interesting trip around Scotland, that’s for sure!

Thank you NetGalley for the eARC!