I don’t think this is true. Yes, the fairies are harder to see. But if you’re paying attention, even industrial, tarmac-ribboned, electrified modern England still has plenty of “thin places”: spots where the air is different, and the uncanny is just at the edge of awareness.

Dunwich, on England’s Suffolk coast, is one of these places. But now it is in cinders after a four-day blaze. Amid this summer’s arid, weeks-long drought and successive heatwaves, all of England is tinder-dry. In windy, flammable coastal conditions, all it took was one spark — a glint through broken glass, a careless cigarette, or abandoned barbecue.

The Dunwich fire, though now hemmed in by local fire crews, consumed 150 hectares of heath and woodland, forcing the evacuation of local villages, holiday parks, and other establishments. Conservationists are calling it a disaster from which local ecologies will take 25 years to recover. Oh, my England! But perhaps this can stand as a reminder that even this green and pleasant land, so long inhabited and so deeply over-written and sculpted by successive histories and people, still has its own elemental power; its own quiet but overwhelming force. Its own spirits, not displaced by industrialization at all, that answer to none of us, but only themselves.

If you’ve encountered one of England’s thin places, you’ll know what I’m referring to: an eerie, liminal sense of things just out of eyeshot, of eyes watching you from the grass. This tends to be more associated with Wales, Cornwall, and Scotland: the uplands and borderlands less thoroughly rationalized, mapped, and subdued. But the rich tradition of artists, writers, composers and eccentrics who have fled (and still flee) to Suffolk’s big skies attests to the distinctive way this region’s own special landscape is still thick with fairies.

Think of the estuaries, where sea and sky, fresh and salt, blend imperceptibly into one another. The long cry of the curlew. Half-rotted wood, sunk in mud, clung with limpets and moss. These are English thin places that sing to something just as liminal in the English, as a people: a paradoxical love of home, but also of longing for the open sea. This is a people that looks out beyond the estuaries, the salt tang, and sucking mud — but also back at cottages, cozy pubs, and warm firesides. Suffolk captures that restless yearning for the horizon, long ground into the seafaring English psyche, and the same people’s island-dwelling love of home.

Much more than any twee nonsense about Paddington, or tea, or manners, the paradoxical, slightly melancholy experience of desiring both these things at the same time is at the heart of what it means to be English. And Dunwich is, in this sense, especially liminal and melancholy, because even before this summer’s fire most of it was already lost.

During the Anglo-Saxon period prior to the Norman invasion, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles. A thriving port covering an area similar in scale to, though smaller in population than, medieval London, it was listed in the Domesday Book as having three churches. Historians estimate its population at that time as around 3,000. In the 13th century, a Franciscan friary was built on the nearby headland. But then climate disaster struck.

A storm surge in the late 13th century repeatedly battered the region, flooding the port and gnawing at the coastline. The harbor silted up. The shore changed shape. And, importantly, the river that was the town’s raison d’être moved. Dunwich was suddenly no longer a sheltered harbor, sitting at the meeting-point of the river and the sea. Now the river was more than a mile away, winding through a different estuarial flat. The town lost its purpose. Further floods swept more homes into the sea. No one rebuilt them; people moved on.

Now, Dunwich is a tiny coastal village, home to around 200 people, a chip shop, and (temporarily, once a year) a lot of London cyclists. They gather every summer (the last event was a couple of weeks ago) to ride overnight from London Fields to Dunwich Beach, in the cult-like “Dunwich Dynamo” bike ride, known by the nutters who participate as the “Dun Run”.

The first time I visited Dunwich I was in the heady early stages of falling in love. We arrived there and were caught as instantly by the otherworldly atmosphere, as by the sea breeze. It was a bright day; we sat on the shingle watching the North Sea roll in, blue and brown, as passing dogs leaped in and out of the waves.

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We built towers from the smooth rocks on the beach, dozed, dreamed amid the whisper and roar of wind and water. Hours slipped by. Time works differently there. The fairy denizens of Dunwich may not be those of green cliffs and woodland, of the kind you might still sense in (say) north Wales, or Cornwall. But they’re there. Dunwich attracts a stream of visitors so dedicated that despite its tiny population, its beachside and chip shop do a roaring trade. This isn’t just mad London cyclists. It’s that people come to be, for a little while, at the edge of everything.

A popular local legend has it that on foggy nights, you can hear the sound of church bells ringing over the water, from the town that fell into the sea. I’ve never experienced this, but it feels profoundly true, in the sense that Dunwich is thronged with shades. The ruins of its friary can still be seen, and visited, on the headland — and here, too, many report strange happenings: weird lights bobbing about the ruins at night, said by some to be the mysterious Hobby Lanterns or jack-o’-lanterns, unexplained lights reported to lead travelers toward cliff-edges or other dangers. Others report seeing ghostly monks pacing the ruins, or hearing their chants.

Since that first visit I’ve returned as often as I can just to sit at that eastern edge of England, between sea and sky. The coastline itself feels ethereal: its very history attests to how little faith we really can place on the ground staying solid beneath us. But perhaps this summer’s blazes are less a departure from that ancient Dunwich story, than a continuation of it.

This is a part of England that’s always been thin, elemental, and only tenuously mastered by its inhabitants. War history aficionados sometimes visit Dunwich to explore the concrete bunkers that still stand along that coast, half-eroded by salt and wind, from wartime preparations for a seaborne invasion that, mercifully, never came. Its still earlier ruins were left following an invasion not borne by sea, but by the sea itself.

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All those centuries ago, the devouring sea, and changing coastline, shrugged off an entire habitation. This time, it was a fire that drove its human inhabitants away. I dare say they’ll be back; but perhaps we should heed the warning. We’ve grown used to an England so domesticated, industrialized, controlled and controllable as to render this kind of abrupt eviction by the landscape itself all but unimaginable. We tend simply to take for granted the belief we’ve mastered all those elemental forces, permanently, such that worrying about fire, or flood, or erosion is merely a thing of our more primitive past, or something that happens to people in other countries.

Even contemporary responses to climate change don’t really depart from this complacency. Manmade climate change is real. But wherever some kind of coordinated policy effort emerges, to respond to it, in practice this only ever seems to produce more and different technological efforts: more solar farms, different cars, a thicket of new rules.

What if the response we actually need is to think differently? Periodically some bushy-bearded Merlin type will bob to the surface of the mediasphere to warn that what we should be doing is not building more or different stuff, but attending more closely to the thin places, and what they have to tell us. No one ever listens, or if they do, somehow the product is only ever more or different stuff.

I could respond to the fire in Dunwich with a threnody for a landscape that has shaped my summers, and my imagination of England, for my whole adult life. A place I love deeply, caught as it is between land and water, singing so evocatively of both salt air, deep England, and all our accumulated centuries of ghosts. But I find that instead I read this as a wake-up call from the still deeper England, the land that was there when the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and will still be there long after we — and whoever comes after us — are gone.

However mild and generous that land is, for the most part, now and then it too can still shrug, as though scratching an itch — and, in doing so, dislodge whoever or whatever was there at that moment. Anyone who claims the right to call this land home would do well to listen. To spend time in its thin places, hear what they have to tell us, and mend our lives accordingly.

Such an experience is starkly at odds with the world we inhabit today — one that has, over recent centuries, been progressively disenchanted by its subordination to the instrumental logic of science and technology. Medieval Christianity viewed the world as a book of signs, written by God and open to poetic or mystical interpretation. It was only around the 17th century — the age of Bacon and Descartes — that we began in earnest to lose the capacity for this kind of thinking. Then God first withdrew to the status of “watchmaker” for the world as mechanical watch, and finally — for many — disappeared altogether in favour of science and logic.

The shift away from the medieval mindset toward the scientific one is usually seen as a positive one. But it has left us poorly-equipped (unless we’re on mushrooms) to grasp just how different the thought-worlds of our forebears were, and how thronged with the uncanny. As folklorist Francis Young recounts, until relatively recently the British Isles was alive with “godlings”: spirits, creatures of legend and folklore. Young recounts the record of 6th-century Welsh St Samson of Dol, who reportedly encountered a terrifying “theomacha”, a “God fighter”, while travelling through a Welsh forest – an entity in the figure of an old woman who attacked and injured St Samson’s companion. Nor were such eldritch encounters only a feature of the so-called “Dark Ages” that preceded the medieval era. The 12th-century Gerald of Wales recounts meeting a man who would converse with “tiny huntsmen” who would tell him people’s secret sins.

Sometimes on woodland dog-walks after dark, the gleam of my torch will catch the eyes of a hidden muntjac and I’ll realise with a jolt that the woodland has been watching me all the time. When I try to picture life with all those non-human watchers, but without the comforting beam of light, it’s easy to imagine knowing that fairies are real.

At the very least, perhaps such beings represent a poetic way of expressing something indisputable: that there exist life-forms unfathomably different from our own, but deeply bound up with ours. The scientific explanation for the “fairy ring” circular pattern of mushroom growth is the underground presence of tiny threads called mycelia, that grow through the soil in a circular formation. As the biologist Merlin Sheldrake argues, such mycelia together form a primordial “mycorrhizal network” — a vast, underground matrix. And while this is not an “intelligence” in any sense we’d recognise, it is essential to plant life: an “ancient association” which “gave rise to all recognisable life on land”.

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More than two centuries on from William Paley’s “watchmaker theory”, the received mainstream understanding of the world has little to say about mysterious underground mycorrhizal networks. Rather, it tends to describe a mechanistic universe, made of atoms, and devoid of governing intelligence or telos. For someone raised with this worldview, being stripped by hallucinogens of this frame of logic and causality can be exhilarating, eye-opening or simply terrifying. But even accepting that mind-altering substances can, well, alter the mind, even those who indulge would generally view the change as a mere chemical effect.

Last weekend, though, I found myself in just such a mind-altering experience without any such help. Trudging along a muddy path, I passed a “fairy ring” of mushrooms, and fell to thinking about my own hallucinatory adventures and what they suggest about perception. It struck me that even in the most mundane patch of woodland there’s still always something eerie at the edge of vision. As with the gleam of deer-eyes after dark, in the woods it takes only a minor shift in consciousness for all the godlings to creep back out from behind the trees.

Walking on, I passed a gate that seemed familiar and yet strange. I turned again, kept walking, and thought: oh look, another fairy ring. It wasn’t until several minutes further on that I realised that strange-looking gate was the exit, a route I’ve taken hundreds of times. The world suddenly resolved itself into the familiar again: I had passed the fairy ring twice, and was well on my way for a second lap round the woods.

Was it a fit of absent-mindedness? It felt as unmistakably an altered-state experience as being on mushrooms – except it was Saturday morning, and I was stone cold sober. It was like a message from the godlings: a reminder that the world only seems inert, because we’re used to seeing it that way.

And also, perhaps, a reminder that our age of disenchantment is on its way out. For inhabitants of mainstream modern British culture, raised in the birthplace of science and engineering, this may seem counter-intuitive. Fragments of old godlings may cling on in the very wild places, but Britain expelled our last major outbreak of millenarian religious fanatics to the New World, in the century of Bacon and Descartes. Our established church is so doctrinally tepid and reflexively conflict-averse, that hosting “silent discos” or installing helter-skelters in Anglican cathedrals prompts only the mildest of objections.

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Those Anglican thinkers troubled by this are sometimes to be found yearning for a return of some sense of mystery. In “Re-Enchanting Christianity” the priest Dave Tomlinson speaks of how “Our world longs for numinosity: for a sense of awe and mystery, for sacredness, spirituality and enchantment, for something ‘more’ than the purely rational and cerebral”. And, he argues, “If the church fails to engage with, and cater to, this longing, it has no real future”.

Despite such efforts, there’s little of the numinous to be found in mainstream modern Anglicanism. But the wider world is on the opposite trajectory. I suspect the future belongs not to the sedate, polite mindset of logic and science to which Britain gave birth, and which by and large we still prefer, but the far more slippery, immanent, and enchanted one of millenarian religious narratives and wild forest beings.

My evidence for this is less the rise in religious extremism, noticeable though this has been especially in recent weeks. Rather, it’s signs that we’re losing the ability across the board to see the world in mechanistic terms: for example losing our ability to build or maintain complex systems, or even keep the roads repaired.

My best effort at explaining this phenomenon is that it’s happening because we are — at least compared with recent predecessors — simply ever less interested in the world of atoms, and physics, and cause and effect. Instead, leaders today are fixated on moral or symbolic dimensions. Evidence of this shift in priorities is everywhere, but perhaps its starkest instance might be what’s sometimes denounced as a “woke takeover of science” — but which could just as accurately be described as the re-subordination of empiricism to moral doctrine.

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Even geopolitics has not escaped this re-subordination of reality to grand narratives. The neoconservative American wars, for example, were impelled at least in part by a religious impulse to globalise liberal democracy at gunpoint. Over the same period, too, they’ve been joined by other competing apocalypses. Believers in the climate variant conduct an escalating campaign of dramatic public protest. And the bitter dispute between Israel and Palestine has also, since the Nineties, accrued increasingly eschatalogical religious overtones.

The conflict in Palestine is of course complex. But contra the assertions of groups such as the New Atheists in the early 2000s that all forms of faith were destined for the scrapheap, grand apocalyptic narratives are growing not less but ever more influential. Along with the now endemic re-moralisation of governance, education, and science, this all presages a world that still (at least for now) has cars, and guns, and smartphones — but that runs not on the mechanistic logic of cause and effect, overseen by a remote divine watchmaker, but far more mercurial and sometimes violent logics of faith.

Is there any good news, amid this unsettling re-moralisation of the world? Well, if my Saturday-morning mushroom moment has a lesson it’s that mind-bending shifts in perception may be unnerving, but rich in insight. “Apocalypse” doesn’t just mean “end of the world” but also “revelation”. In Sheldrake’s view, the networked life of fungi can teach us to see ourselves as more porous ‑ something that, he argues, can help us to grasp our interconnectedness with other species, and thus perhaps to find new inspiration for tackling the ecological crisis.

We can perhaps extend this into the re-enchantment of public life: it may re-entangle us in frightening ways, but perhaps we’ll also be less lonely with it. Even so, those Anglicans calling for “re-enchantment” should perhaps be careful what they wish for. Outside the lamplight, the godlings were always looking back.

This was good-humoured inter-colleague banter but there was a seriousness in my words. Take opera, ballet, classical music, drama, poetry — take almost any medium you like — and you will find unapologetic representations of fairy stories. Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera, Hansel and Gretel, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker or The Sleeping Beauty, Spenser’s The Fairy Queen, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, Keats’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci or the many poems about the Sidhe by W. B. Yeats — all admired and respected by adults. So why, then, in the world of novels is it only in children’s literature considered really respectable to speak of fairies or magic?

There are a few allowed exceptions. Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s superb novel about a witch has lately come back into fashion, especially among younger readers. Penelope Fitzgerald’s understated novels often have an element of the other-worldly slipped subtly into the fabric of the more quotidian plot; indeed, this is essential to the ending of her masterpiece, The Gate of Angels, where a supranatural element is brilliantly and suddenly invoked. Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, or her still more original Piranesi, have been rightly lauded. But, for the most part, anything to do with witches, wizards, ghosts, spirits and fairies is considered at best whimsy, at worst tosh.

But why? Why is this subject, which former ages embraced as representing time-honoured intangible aspects of life beyond our everyday experience, now ignored or despised?

My first novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, drew on the very old tale — part-Jewish, part, very likely, Zoroastrian — of Tobias and the Angel, and I wove it into a contemporary drama in which the Archangel Raphael makes a transforming appearance. The fact that the book was set in Venice threw a camouflaging mist over this element. Since then, and throughout my career as a novelist, following many years working as a Jungian analyst, I have deployed the mythical, fabulous and supernatural in my books. But while readers have apparently warmed to this theme, and indeed ask for more, in reviews, even the most favourable, this aspect is overlooked, as if to even mention the subject is to be somehow tainted with the unrespectable.

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My latest novel, The Gardener, received praise for its psychological rendering of characters and its treatment of post-referendum Britain, but no single review touched on the fact that the ancient landscape, in which the book is set, appears to be the domain of another world and at the heart of the book there is a scene which depends upon this factor. It was as if by politely ignoring the subject they were doing me a favour, sparing me some unliterary egg on my face.

I believe this loss to fiction is part of a larger loss which is concurrent with the undeniable increase of the reign of those grim twin isms, reductionism and materialism. We once inhabited a world that was animate, in which humans were creatures who not only perceived but were themselves perceived. To live in this world meant to live among vital elements that were beyond our human control, that could not be corralled by human will, or predicted or captured by desire.

Whether or not Shakespeare believed in fairies is irrelevant. He had within his repertoire a living concept of fairies with whom, or through whom, he could dramatise the irreducible folly of humankind. “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” Puck observes. When, in the same play, Duke Theseus superciliously pontificates about the spurious nature of the imagination, a faculty which in his view is allied only with poets and madmen — and which he rubbishes since it “bodies forth the form of things unknown” — he does so to an audience who has just been witnessing, in the form of the fairies, the power of the so-called “unknown” to disrupt, disarray and revitalise human life (the joke, set up by his author is that Theseus himself is a creature of myth).

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Earlier cultures were more extrovert than ours, so those invisible realities that we have internalised, and tend to treat as at best poetic metaphors, at worst psychiatric conditions, were habitually expressed as externalised presences, imaginative forms of invisible truths. Shakespeare still lived in a world where “the real” was not confined to the tangible or the testable. A dream, a wish, an impulse, and instinct — these are all “realities” despite their insubstantial nature. We don’t question the reality of a dream — or if we do, we are more likely to be questioning something like the integrity of the reporter of the dream. We might question the dream’s meaning, but that is another matter. Nor do we question the reality of, say, fear, or joy, or embarrassment — we might suggest it is irrational or inappropriate but again, unless the person reporting these emotions is a liar, fear or joy is a potent reality for the subject who experiences it, whatever the cause.

Let us assume, then, that angels, fairies and gods are those traditional aesthetic forms that have traditionally served to stand for the rarer aspects of life that are intuited and are both real and impalpable — reality being only partially confined to what can be empirically verified. The philosopher and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist persuasively argues for a world in which all matter, together with all the multifarious forms of life, is conscious — consciousness not being substantially comparable in degree or effectiveness (as he puts it, the fact that the mountain behind his house doesn’t shop at Sainsbury’s or drink a beer in the evening does not logically make it less conscious than you or me). But nonetheless, in his view, consciousness runs, to use Wordsworth’s terms, “through all things”.

Whether or not fairies, gods and angels exist is not the point. Fairies, gods, and angels can, and should be, thought of as manifestations of the mysterious untold aspects of a world whose multiple facets are not easily apparent to us but nonetheless have salience, responsiveness and place — an argument made enchantingly by the philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart, who shares many of McGilchrist’s ideas. To see the world as made up of dimensions other than ours, and possibly more vital and responsive than ours, is not merely a modest but a quite rational perspective.

It seems to me odd that while we accept, for example, the reality of the Higgs Boson, so far radically unavailable to our ordinary perception, we laugh off the reality of these other invisible forms, which have been convincingly attested to and certainly respected, if only as powerful images, by people of acknowledged genius. At the very least, they represent states of intelligence beyond the ordinary order available to our circumscribed and culturally limited perception. A hidden layer, or layers, of the world responsive to us foolish mortals, that may react and respond surprisingly to us, in ways both beneficent and malign.

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McGilchrist’s originating thesis is that we have allowed the deconstructing, limiting and over-explanatory left hemisphere to overtake and dominate our culture, which has left us lonely and unwitnessed in a seemingly dead world. His claim is that the brain’s right hemisphere, which uncritically absorbs and intuits experience, which doesn’t dismiss or judge but sees out the corner of the eye rather than with a narrowing squint, has had a diminishing influence in our culture, with the result that the culture has lost its way, and we in it.

So that the world that once, for all its many dolours, seemed in Matthew Arnold’s words “so various, so beautiful, so new” is now also in his words “a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight”, not because the nature of the world has changed but because the nature of how we perceive it has changed, and so radically and dispiritingly. And with that shift has died a loss of wonder, a loss not simply of religious awe, but, what might be worse, the range of the aesthetic palette. If, as I passionately do, you believe that the arts expand experience and thereby enlarge meaning, then we need a wider range not a narrower one to work with. There may or may not be fairies at the bottom of my own garden. But they may, by the perspicacious, be found at the bottom of my fictional garden, and I don’t apologise for one moment for that.

And just as calm was restored, yet another witch was arrested, in October: Andrew Man, apparently a wandering magician from Rathven, who could cure sick animals and people using skills given to him by “the people of the hills”.

Andrew does not fit our stereotype of the witch. For one thing, he is a man. For another, unlike the blank-faced and completely innocent victims of the Salem witch trials, Andrew did believe himself capable of using powerful magic. According to his testimony, he was the lover of the Queen of the Fairies, and had gotten many children with her. He was also helped by a supernatural entity called Christsunday, and had seen the king that died at Flodden (James IV) and Thomas the Rhymer with the fairies, along with other dead people.

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The material in Andrew’s confession includes the tips of some huge story icebergs. Perhaps most interesting is the forgotten culture of Gaelic-speaking regions of Scotland. In Aberdeenshire, the Highlands meet the Lowlands, and it was there that Christianity alternated between assimilating with the Gaelic paganism that preceded it, and clashing savagely with it. The fairy Otherworld lay alongside the everyday world, and it was both dangerous and exciting; its moral neutrality was intolerable to a Christian theology that emphasised life as a war between evil versus good. The witch trials of the sixteenth century were another Christian attempt to purge the last vestiges of Gaelic paganism from rural Aberdeenshire.

For Andrew Man, there was a fairy underworld, physically below the world of men, and culturally subordinated or even repressed or forgotten. Andrew and other magic users were left to carry the traces of this underworld to the surface. In the harsh light of resurgent Scottish Calvinism, such stories were of course misinterpreted as tales of demons. But in the twenty-first century, we are relatively familiar with the idea of the Queen of the Fairies, thanks to us fantasy literature. The very strange figure to us is Christsunday.

Christsunday is a curious name. Perhaps it was meant to be read as Christian at first glance, but the entity in question could hardly be mistaken for a Christian one. From Andrew, we learn that Christsunday is a stag some of the time — a stag that bursts up out of the snow. In Gaelic writings, deer are often able to pass from this world into the Otherworld, and to guide mortals across that border. Figures who rise from below are associated not only with the fairy realm, but with a particular idea about fairies: that they are linked to the dead who die before their time (like James IV and Thomas the Rymer.)

This movement of the Otherworld — from perpetually at the margins of human life, fitfully accessible to those with guidance, to a dark underworld inhabited by the dead — lightly Christianises the Gaelic Otherworld and assimilates it to an afterlife of punishment for sin. These dead figures can be understood by pious Christians as in hell or Purgatory, even though in pagan Gaelic tradition they are in neither.

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This kind of partial Christianisation was common in cultures that abruptly met medieval Catholicism in its evangelical form. New world cultures are full of figures like Christsunday: Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, is an ideal example. The word saint is a Christian cover hurled over what is very plainly an Aztec goddess: Mictēcacihuātl, the “Lady of the Dead”, who ruled Mictlan, the last layer of the underworld. Similar processes occur in both Hoodoo and Voudoun, and also in fully creolised religions like Santería.

But just as the modern Catholic Church condemns the votaries of Santa Muerte, so both the Presbyterian Kirk and the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church sought to condemn those who told tales about such hybrid figures in sixteenth-century Scotland.

Nevertheless, even as local folklore cloaked itself with Christian imagery to protect itself, Christianity appropriated local imagery to make itself more influential. For Andrew Man and most of his countryfolk — for pagans throughout what is now Britain — the solar year still dominated understandings of the supernatural. (If you strip the word Christ off the name Christsunday, you are left with Sunday — or SUN-day.) Medieval Catholicism made a reasonable fist of appropriating this, converting the figure of Sol Invictus, the unconquered Sun, into the figure of the risen Christ.

As long as the agricultural year dominated human experience, the seasons of the sun mattered profoundly; the yearly growth cycles of crops kept representatives of solar triumph in circulation, even if they had once been owned by the Romans and were always disowned by pure Christians. The compromise arrived at in medieval Christianity was, however, unacceptable to reformed Protestantism: it was the pagan elements absorbed by Christianity that ardent Protestants sought to destroy.

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And it was this, ultimately, that condemned Andrew Man to death in 1597. There has long been a connection suggested between a tentatively identified Gaelic stag-god, sometimes called Cernunnos, and Dīs Pater, a Roman lord of the underworld. Andrew himself would not have known these names, but it is likely that some of his interrogators would have been able to make the link. Certainly, Scotland’s James VI made any number of such connections in his book Daemonologie, published the same decade as Andrew’s trial.

For a Christian courtroom, the idea of a dark world beneath, from which people might frequently emerge — an underworld dominated by a highly sexual queen — could not be made to harmonise consistently with any Christian idea of a wholly spiritual resurrection. It may have felt uncomfortably close to a medieval story of the birth of Christ from his human mother’s flesh. Such adjacencies killed Andrew because they could not be tolerated.

We use the words witch hunt now quite lightly, to mean job losses at the very worst. But in 1597 it meant the loss of everything. Liberty, and life. Among many losses are lost records: we have only fragmentary material on any of the Aberdeenshire trials, and for some we have no records at all. That is as the prosecution wished. The last thing the record offers on the Aberdeenshire witch panic is a series of chilling payments for the materials of execution: 20 pieces of peat, four tar barrels, a length of rope to tie the victims to the stake, along with their stories that might unsettle the prevailing religious powers.

It’s worth remembering how these identities were forgotten. It was no accident; they were deliberately destroyed, burned to the bone. It is not insignificant that the last linguistic traces of Highland Gaelic paganism are about to disappear with Scottish Gaelic. In England, witches were not burned, but hanged as felons. In Scotland, they were first strangled to death, and then the body consumed by fire in a ritual designed to ensure that they were gone completely, gone for good. Such extirpation suggests an uneasy sense that stories like these might still emerge out of the Gaelic underworld, bringing with them a horde of restless dead rebels — who might threaten current governance in the way that the Aberdeenshire witches terrified the ruling class.