chief." This reflection was suggested to him by the Broch of
Cleik-him-in (now usually written Clickemin), near Lerwick; and in
describing it he says: "The interior gallery, with its apertures, is so
extremely low and narrow, being only about three feet square, that it is
difficult to conceive how it could serve the purpose of communication.
At any rate, the size fully justifies the tradition prevalent here, as
well as in the south of Scotland, that the Picts were a diminutive
race." Of the Broch of Mousa he says: "The uppermost gallery is so
narrow and low that it was with great difficulty I crept through it,"--a
feat which baffled the present writer.[94] In all those cases, of
course, it is understood one has to crawl. As with the Lapps and the
Eskimos, creeping was much more a matter of course with the builders of
those places than it is with us. After getting through such passages it
happens that, in several instances, the roof is higher than is required
for the tallest living man. An admirable example of such a place is the
underground "Picts' House" at Pitcur, in Forfarshire, which would be
quite a palace to people of a small race, and very likely figures as
such in some popular tale; its dimensions and appearance considerably
magnified with every century.[95] But even this "fairy palace" was
entered by narrow, downward-sloping passages, similar to that seen in
the Frontispiece, down and up which the dwellers 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 on