Meet Claire Mitchell KC

Claire Mitchell is a King’s Counsel, born in Glasgow, currently living in Edinburgh. In 2020 she co-founded the Witches of Scotland campaign with Zoe Venditozzi, to seek justice for those accused of witchcraft and executed as witches in Scotland.

The campaign strives for a public apology to the accused – which was granted in 2022 – a formal pardon for all those convicted, and a national memorial for all victims of the Scottish witch hunts. To achieve the latter, Witches of Scotland created a commemorative tartan earlier this year.

Mitchell has always had an interest in everything gothic and loved stories of witches and wizards, years before they entered the mainstream consciousness through the massively popular Harry Potter books. “I always knew vaguely that Scotland had something to do with witchcraft,” she says. “It was always at the back of my mind somewhere. But I never researched it.” She only truly began exploring Scotland’s history with witchcraft after law school and she was overwhelmed by what she found. “The more I researched, the more I thought oh my God, there’s thousands of cases. Not just a hundred, not just a thousand, several thousands of cases all spread throughout Scotland, and I was just amazed at the size of it, because nobody had told me about it.”

With this newfound knowledge, she became acutely aware of how little attention is paid to women’s stories. While walking through Edinburgh, a city bursting with history, the realisation that women seemed absent from it dawned on her. “Everywhere you look, men; all the statues are of men, all the war memorials are of men. If you came down here as an alien and looked around, you would have no idea women exist. At all,” she says. “The world is being recreated in the eyes of men. Women’s struggles and women’s achievements are just not being seen. We’re not recording that. We should be recording that.”

The Witches of Scotland campaign has amassed over 40,000 followers on social media, and Mitchell and Venditozzi’s book, How to Kill a Witch, has been met with critical acclaim. Still, not everyone sees the point of the campaign. “When I started, a lot of people thought it was a joke,” Mitchell says. “And they said, ‘Why aren’t you doing stuff for the living?’ and I said, ‘I am. That’s my actual day job. Everyone’s allowed a hobby, and this is my hobby’. But the other criticism is, ‘Why do you look back? Why are you trying to change the past?’. I’m not trying to change the past; I want to acknowledge in the present that the past got it wrong. We benefit from it, because we can reflect upon what happened, we can put right what’s wrong and we can vow to do better.”