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CAWDOR CASTLE.
slanting windows, and a great iron door at the entrance on the second story as you ascend the stairs, all indicate the rude times in which this castle was erected. There were here some large venerable trees."
It is surprising that he should have thought that there could ever have been a moat on a rock high above the river. Johnson nevertheless also mentions it. What they mistook for a moat is the
VAULT.
excavation made in quarrying the stone for the castle. In clearing it out some while ago, the workmen came to a place where the masons had left some stones half dressed. Mr. Irving, who visited Cawdor, has had the fine entrance copied, I am told, in his scenery for Macbeth, adding, however, a portcullis, of which no traces remain. I was shown in a kind of vault the trunk of the old hawthorn which Boswell mentions. There is a tradition that "a wise
