To hell with the portrait hole -- how did he get through the front door? Shouldn't that be guarded or warded as well?
I think it possibly is - which is why Snape was so emphatic in suggesting that he couldn't possibly have got into the castle without help from an insider at Hallowe'en.
But Sirius is one of the authors of the Marauder's Map. Fred and George are of the opinion that even Filch doesn't know all of the routes in and out of the castle that are detailed on that, and Filch often performs the function of security guard as well as caretaker.
So there's a good chance that those secret passages got forgotten about a century or two back, and therefore didn't get warded if/when security was beefed up elsewhere. In fact, they can't be, or it wouldn't have taken Draco reporting a sighting of Harry in Hogsmeade to alert the teaching staff to the fact that he'd been out of bounds. Alarm bells would have gone off the second he set foot in the passageway.
no subject
I think it possibly is - which is why Snape was so emphatic in suggesting that he couldn't possibly have got into the castle without help from an insider at Hallowe'en.
But Sirius is one of the authors of the Marauder's Map. Fred and George are of the opinion that even Filch doesn't know all of the routes in and out of the castle that are detailed on that, and Filch often performs the function of security guard as well as caretaker.
So there's a good chance that those secret passages got forgotten about a century or two back, and therefore didn't get warded if/when security was beefed up elsewhere. In fact, they can't be, or it wouldn't have taken Draco reporting a sighting of Harry in Hogsmeade to alert the teaching staff to the fact that he'd been out of bounds. Alarm bells would have gone off the second he set foot in the passageway.