In Atlas Obscura’s Q&A series She Was There, we talk to female scholars who are writing long-forgotten women back into history. In the quiet town of Forres in northern Scotland, jammed between a sidewalk and a stone wall, sits the Witches Stone. Above the worn, wedge-shaped boulder, a sign erected in the 1930s recounts a gruesome execution of a person convicted of witchcraft: The accused was rolled down a hillside in a barrel laden with spikes, their “mangled” remains then burned. While there is no historical documentation of such an…
