300 years on, will thousands of women burned as witches finally get justice?

Lawyer seeks pardon for 2,500 Scots who were tortured and killed in satanic panic' begun by James VI

It spanned more than a century and a half, and resulted in about 2,500 people - the vast majority of them women - being burned at the stake, usually after prolonged torture. Remarkably, one of the driving forces behind Scotland's satanic panic" was no less than the king, James VI, whose treatise, Daemonologie, may have inspired the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

Now, almost 300 years after the Witchcraft Act was repealed, a campaign has been launched for a pardon for those convicted, an apology to all those accused and a national memorial to be created.