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 4½ feet in height, and for the greater part of its length only
2 feet wide, expanding to 3½, 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 3½ 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