heh, funny that I was just sharing my MLitt dissertation with someone the other day. ShyViolet was very helpful when I was moving into my Scottish university experience, even if we did go to competing schools!
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At Glasgow, we were strongly encouraged to choose our topic in our first few weeks. I was one of a very very few people who had their topic from the beginning but that was by sheer dumb luck of having tea with a friend who lived in a beautiful ornate tenement. I chose to discuss Glasgow tenement hallway tiles from 1880-1916. It evolved and narrowed in focus a bit, to where I was focusing on two neighborhoods in the south side of the city which hadn't really been researched (in comparison to the tenements in the west end of the city which have been researched a lot more because it's a more posh area).
You might say, "tiles?, really?". But what was interesting was to research the development of the southern neighborhoods, the tenement building style and the change in building materials as a response to larger social events (cholera, overcrowding, poverty, increased commerce on the River Clyde, and what could be described as an early suburban migration). It's not just the tiles, it's the reason for the tiles, and the social status they denoted.
Shy was correct about the length of an MLitt/MPhil dissertation being about 15,000 words...although I used the entire allotment of 20,000 plus the "overage" allotment, so I ended with 20,568 excluding indexes (of which I had 3)...the whole thing was 180+ pages, and an entire year of my life. I'm still sort of shell shocked by the whole thing, but it was very very rewarding to finish it, and my research skills were whipped into shape by the experience.
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