Note 186 — Chapter XIII

Even with this roof-light the interior of the dwelling can only have received a limited supply of daylight. And this explains the statement made by a Scotch peasant who was taken by a "fairy" woman into her abode. "Being asked by the judge [before whom he was tried for 'witchcraft'] whether the place within the hill, which he called a hall, were light or dark, he said 'Indifferent, as it is with us in the twilight.'"

At night, when the abode of the "hillmen" was lit up with the glow of the fire, the cavity above the building, and the atmosphere overhead, must have also received some share of the firelight. This would account for the statement made by Wallace (who wrote at the period when "Evil Spirits also called Fairies" were "frequently seen in several of the [Orkney] Isles dancing and making merry,") to the effect that, "in the Parish of Evie, near the Sea, are some small Hillocks, which frequently, in the Night time, appear all in a fire." And when Mrs. Ewing, in her "Old-Fashioned Fairy Tales," says that shian is "a Gaelic name for fairy towers, which by day are not to be told from mountain crags," she evidently alludes to the same feature.