In C.71 Kinbote says "My tutor, a Scotsman, used to call any old tumble-down building a 'hurley-house.'" The Scotsman, of course, is Walter Campbell, who taught his pupils to recite "Lord Ronald's Coronach," by Sir Walter Scott. It makes sense, then, that Scott may also be the source of "hurley-house." In one scene from Scott's The Pirate, Clement Cleveland is moping around in an old Orkney ruin. (He was pale, and had lost both the fire of his eye and the vivacity of his step). A stranger then comes to talk to him:
"I am glad you spoke first," answered the stranger, carelessly; "I was determined to know whether you were Clement Cleveland, or Clement's ghost, and they say ghosts never take the first word, so I now set it down for yourself in life and limb; and here is a fine old hurly-house you have found out for an owl to hide himself in at mid-day, or a ghost to revisit the pale glimpses of the moon, as the divine Shakespeare says."
The allusion is from Hamlet 1.4.53, where Hamlet asks his father's ghost what it means that he "Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature...." This exchange leads to the conversation which ends in "gins to pale his ineffectual fire." Moreover, the imagery of the passage resonates with the Timon passage from which "Pale Fire" gets its name.
Matt Roth