The Wigtown Martyrs or Solway Martyrs, Margaret Lachlan and Margaret Wilson were Scottish Covenanters who were executed by Scottish Episcopalians in 1685 in Wigtown, by tying them to stakes on the town’s mudflats and allowing them to drown with the rising tide.
The largest of the monuments to the Wigtown Martyrs stands on Windy Hill, on the western edge of Wigtown where it commands wide views over much of Galloway. The remaining two monuments are rather less obvious and in many ways much more poignant.
On the eastern edge of the town stand the remains of Wigtown’s Old Kirk, next door to its more recent replacement. In the kirkyard behind the ruins of the Old Kirk is a railed enclosure in which you find the graves of the five who died that day. The gravestones carry detailed inscriptions that amount to cries of outrage and have lost none of their force over the intervening centuries.
the last of the three martyr’s monuments is the the Martyr’s Stake on the edge of Wigtown Bay, found by following the road beyond the church. Margaret Wilson is also remembered in the form of a monument in the graveyard of the Church of the Holy Rude in Stirling.