 In "The Interpreter's House" (1975), David Daniell notes that "Witch Wood" is tightly enclosed, with everything taking place under a heavy, black, suffocating pall of evil.Buchan's writing, Daniell says, "catches the obscene out of the tail of the eye, where it is most effective"; "Projecting his own favourite Scottish place, Broughton, back three centuries when the whole area was under forest, and doing it so convincingly, is a considerable feat.Doing it with such economic realism and keeping up a multiple pressure of plot makes it extraordinary".