had to crawl.  An underground gallery such as that of Ardtole (near Ardglass, County Down), is somewhat puzzling, because, while one chamber off it rises to a height of 5 feet 3 inches, another is only 3-1/2 feet high; and the main gallery, for 70 feet of its length, is 4-1/2 feet high, with a width of 3 feet 4 inches.  The inference from this seems to be that the occupants were under 4-1/2 feet in height.  If they had intended to crawl along the 70 feet, they did not require so high a roof; whereas, if they walked, and if they were more than 4-1/2 feet in height, they would need to walk the 70 feet in a stooping posture, a constraint which they could easily have avoided by raising the roof a foot or two.  The highest roof in all this souterrain being 5 feet 3, it does not seem likely that the builders were taller than that; and there seems more reason to believe that they were much smaller.  Another such gallery in Sutherlandshire is “nowhere more than 4-1/2 feet in height, and for the greater part of its length only 2 feet wide, expanding to 3-1/2, for about 3 feet only from the inner end.”  Still more restricted is the “rath-cave” of Ballyknock, in the parish of Ballynoe, barony of Kinnatalloon, County Cork.  “The cave is a mere cutting in the clayey subsoil, and is roofed with flags resting on the clayey banks of the cutting, of which the length is about 100 feet, and the height and width from 3 to 3-1/2 feet, except that the width to a height of 2 feet is hardly a foot at the N.W. turn, 23 feet from the N.E. end, and at a point 27 feet from the S.E. end....  Right below the aperture ... was a short pillar-stone, deeply scored with Oghams ... [and] many of the roofing slabs were seen ... to be inscribed with Oghams, some large and others minute."[96]

“This class of structures deserves a careful study,” observes Captain Thomas, referring to the souterrains of the north-west of Scotland;[97] “for the room or accommodation afforded by this mode of building is exceedingly small when compared with the labour expended in procuring it; besides, the doorway or entry is often so contracted that no bulky object, not even a very stout man, could get in ...  But what are we to think when the single passage is so small that only a child could crawl through it?”

[Footnote 94:  On the very topmost course of all, the gallery dwindles into such insignificant dimensions that not even a dwarf (as one would naturally understand that term) could creep along it.  Scott cannot have meant this very extremity.  With regard to it, I should be inclined to say that it was merely the necessary finish of the gallery, not intended to be used any more than the spaces beside the eaves of a house.]

[Footnote 95:  The tendency to “idealisation on the part of the narrator” is referred to, in this connection, by Mr. Joseph Jacobs, at p. 242 of his “English Fairy Tales” (London, D. Nutt, 1890).]