When I first started this book, i was worried as so many of my GR friends had raved about it, and I didn’t connect with it right away. While she waits, Charles Leslie, an Irish Jacobite, comes to her cell, eager for proof that might implicate the king in the massacre and assist in James's restoration to the English throne.

The structure of the novel is such that the first-person narrator flips between the “witch” telling her story and the reverend writing to his wife.Corrag takes the old and beaten horse of a cruel neighbour, a grey mare who becomes her best and only friend, and spends the next year living off the land and making her way north-west where she arrives in Glencoe. Corrag was a nasty, dirty creature in chains in a dark and dank prison cell, and Reverend Leslie was a pious, self satisfied jerk. In Fletcher's version, Corrag has escaped persecution in Northumberland and reached Rannoch Moor on a stolen mare, finding a refuge in the hidden valley on Bidean nam Bian where the MacDonalds of Glencoe kept their stolen cattle.

However, her warnings to the clan fell on deaf ears and she awoke on the morning of the 13th February 1692 to discover the devastation that had been wrought by the government soldiers: houses burnt to the ground, families fled to the hills, and MacIain himself – the Chief of the MacDonalds - murdered as he rose from his bed. I have a soft spot for anything set among the Scottish mountains, and there is plenty to enjoy here, but ultimately this mixture of history and fantasy proved a little too implausible, and a little too sentimental for my taste. the Somme and many soldiers died, including men from the village of Glencoe, the first since the 1692 massacre. I know who you are…it is better for her that she is burnt, and soon…The fire will clean her of wickedness, and to be purified in death is far better than to live in this manner - unChristian, defiled. Folklore also tells that in 1916 a sword was found when the loch was dredged and brought into the town.The historical details of this book are woven into the story like a delicate and beautiful spider web, soft and seemingly fragile – not overbearing – but with strength and grace and functionality. Fletcher has an astonishing ability to create convincing voice and character within the first fifty pages. It is, however, a novel with moments of such extraordinary beauty and quiet power that it is impossible, having read it, not to look at the world anew. He speaks through this half-creature in a feminine way – and it is better for her that she is burnt, and soon.

We know the Reverend is coming to interview her to learn more about a possible implication of King William of Orange in a clan massacre whereas Rev. Haunting and beautiful, Corrag drew me in and transported me to the Scottish Highlands of the seventeenth century. or Was she freer than most because she lived life on her terms with an open heart and positive attitude? The Highland Witch (entitled Corrag or Witch’s Light in some countries) by Susan Fletcher is based on the events of the 1692 Glencoe Massacre of Clan MacDonald, told from the perspective of a outsider named Corrag.Corrag herself is a consummately drawn character, a half-feral scrap of a thing with tangled hair and a great tenderness for all living creatures. By association, Corrag herself is viewed as a witch given her knowledge of herbs, healing, and her sensitive focus toward the natural world. This passage leads me to be predisposed to like Corrag and believe she is good before I know any of her story. We all have our stories, and we speak of them, and weave them into other people’s stories--that's how it goes, does it not?

What he finds is Corrag - a young woman who has been condemned as a witch and is awaiting death by burning as soon as winter thaws. Leslie, but it turned out to be a very clever way to tell the story and to track the dawning realization of Charles Leslie that Corrag is much more than an object of pity or scorn. The era of witch-hunts is coming to an end – but Charles Leslie, an Irish propagandist and Jacobite, hears of the Massacre and, keen to publicise it, comes to the tollbooth to question her on the events of that night, and the weeks preceding it.

It was often noted that, however stormy the seas or wild the weather, the loch would still long enough to allow boats out for a burial.