It is perhaps needless to add that there is no historical evidence for the apostle of Ireland having ever been at Lough Derg. Derg is probably a mistake for Deirg, and Lough Deirg would mean the Lake of the Cave. Gough, in his additions to Camden, thus described the purgatory: "It was about sixteen feet and a half long, by two feet one inch wide, built of freestone, covered with broad flags and green turf laid over them, and was so low and narrow that a tall man could hardly sit, much less stand in it. In the side was a window just wide enough to admit a faint ray of light; in the floor a cavity capable of containing a man at his length, and under a large stone at the end of the pavement a deep pit; the bottom of the cave was originally much below the surface of the ground. It stood on the east side of the church, in the churchyard, encompassed with a wall, and surrounded by circles or cells, called the beds, scarcely three feet high, denominated from several saints. The penitents who visited the island, after fasting on bread and water for nine days and making processions round these holy stations thrice a day barefoot, for the first seven days, and six times on the eighth, washing their weary limbs each night in the lake, on the ninth enter the cave. Here they observe a twenty-four hours fast, tasting only a little water, and upon quitting it bathe in the lake, and so conclude the ceremony. "Leave being first obtained of the bishop, the prior represented to the penitents all the horror and difficulty of the undertaking, suggesting to them at the same time an easier penance. If they persevered in their resolution, they were conducted to the door with a procession from the convent, and after twenty-four hours confinement let out next morning with the like ceremony." [Footnote: "St. Patrick's Purgatory," by Thomas Wright, London, 1844. _Analecta Bollandiana,_ t. xxvii. (1908). O'Connor, "St. Patrick's Purgatory," Dublin, 1895. MacRitchie, "A Note on St. Patrick's Purgatory," in the Journal of the Roy. Soc. of Ant. of Ireland, 1901.] As may well be supposed, after the long preliminaries and the heavy fees paid, the penitents could hardly, unless unusually strong-minded like the Dutch monk, declare roundly that they had seen nothing. I do not suppose, as already said, that there was any fraud deliberately enacted, personages dressing up as devils and angels, but that the visitor's own dreams, and his vanity or lively imagination were left to propagate the story of the marvels to be seen and heard in Lough Derg.