If your heels are nimble and your toes are light, You may get there by candle-light[1] A longer Scottish version has the lyrics: King and Queen of Cantelon, How many miles to Babylon?
Mae nor ye daur come and see[2] Various places have replaced Babylon in the rhyme, including London town, Barberry and Berry Bright.
In the 1824 edition of The Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia there's a description of the rhyme and the game, giving the distance as "six, seven or a lang eight".
The rhyme was originally accompanied by a singing game in which two lines face each other, with one player in the middle.
[5] The game Red Rover, which is first documented in the early twentieth century, has, in its earliest recorded form, the same rules; hypothesizing a connection between the death of the older game and the spread of the new one is therefore natural, though necessarily speculative.