Coldharrow to Kethu

Three hundred people on a terrace above a drop. You can see Kethu from the square on a clear morning, which everyone here has done every day of their lives.

The only gate, because there is only one approach. Every trade good, every stranger and every count of who did not come back has come through here.

Chest-high, faced with whatever stone came out of the terraces, running from the gate to the lip of the Fall at either end. Two hundred years and not a mark on it that weather did not make.

The reason there is no wall on this side. Sheer, wet most of the year, the sedge-flats a long way down. The one direction nothing can attack from, and the one direction nobody can run.

Four turns of cut road down the scarp. Wide enough for a cart if the carter is careful and sober.

The tightest of the four, where the road doubles back under itself and the rock overhangs. There is a cart on the stones below it from before anyone's grandfather, and nobody has ever gone down for the iron.

Open ground for a bowshot and a half in every direction, burned back each spring by whoever is of age next year. Nothing grows tall enough to hide a standing man.

Sightline to the gate. Manned out of habit by people who have never seen anything come across the Cleared.

The strip they fire each spring so that nothing on it gets above the knee. Black after the burning, green by the Proofing, and black again before you are home.

The path the watch wears between the three towers, walked twice a night for two hundred years. It goes nowhere at all and it is the best-made track in the valley.

Half-height, badly sited, kept because pulling it down would be admitting something. Good place to be told a thing you were not supposed to hear.

The furthest out of the three, and the first that would see anything. Standing a night here is a thing sixteen-year-olds do because their parents did.

Coldharrow's peat-cutting and grazing stops here, so the tracks do too — not at once, but this is where a carter would turn round.

Half a day off any sensible line. Somebody is always walking out to it anyway.

Trenches cut in courses and left to fill, going back further than the oldest face still worked. Coldharrow burns this all winter and every household knows which cut is theirs.

Hard bottom, shallow, and a straight line south. The fast way, and the one every team takes on the first morning while they still think they are making good time.

A track worn down between its own banks, deep enough that you cannot see the country on either side of you. Dry underfoot, which out here is worth the blindness.

The river goes slow and black along here, eating its own bank from underneath. No bottom a man can stand on for the length of a mile.

Wet to the knee for a mile. Slow, and the best foraging within two days of home.

Terraced steps cut into the valley wall by people who were demonstrably not from Coldharrow, going somewhere that is no longer there. The water is higher every year and nobody local has an opinion about why.

Standing water under the sedge, waist-deep where it is not knee-deep, and the best growing ground in the band for exactly that reason. One shelf of dry land stands out of the middle of it, with a drystone bothy on the shelf and fuel stacked against the wall. There is no other roof for two miles.

Pale hard ground with salt crusting in the cracks and nothing on it above the height of a boot. You can be seen across the whole of it, and there is no argument to be had about that.

The one stand that came back, and it came back wrong: thorn and sapling packed so close you cut a yard at a time. Everything the whole Ashwood should have grown, grown in one place.

Somebody dressed stone across this river and somebody else took the middle out of it. You hear the gap a long time before you see it.

There is no marker. The tracks get fainter and then at some point you notice you have not been on one for a while. Every team that has ever gone out has had the same argument about when exactly it happened.

Grey open ground with nothing standing on it two hundred years on. Your boots go in to the ankle and come out white.

The firebreak stops for forty paces and starts again, and the ground between was never cut or fired. Whoever left it left it on purpose, and left it on the far side.

The scar where the Ashwood stops, and it is too straight to be a wildfire. Two hundred years old. Something was being kept on one side of it.

Somebody has built a fire big enough to be seen, which out here means they have stopped caring about being seen.

Standing deadwood and dense scrub between. Slow going, blind at twenty paces, and the richest ground on the map for anything that burns.

Trunks burnt hollow and still upright, close enough that you go through them sideways. They come down in wind and there is no telling which one.

Half a mile of dead timber went over in one night and every trunk of it lies the same way. Whatever wind did that came up the valley, out of the south.

Round scars where the burners stacked and covered and sat up all night with it. Ash still in the bottom of them, and nothing has grown in one yet.

Something has been stripping the deadfall for two miles and stacking it, in order, by size.

A platform lashed into a dead crown, high enough to see the burn end to end. The lashings are new.

The way up out of the wood, and the first ground where being above someone matters.

The first ground high enough to look back from. The wood goes on further behind you than it felt while you were in it.

Cold rock that never sees sun. The only place in the valley frostvein lichen grows, which means it is the only place a ward tonic comes from.

A slope of blocks the size of byres that came off the face all at once. Every one of them is resting on another one.

A shelf running along the faces, wide enough for one and exposed the whole way. Slow, cold, and the only line in the hills where nothing can come at you from above.

A gap worn through the ridge by weather and by whoever used to bring animals up through it. Nobody brings animals up here now.

A trapper's steading with forty years of work in it, sitting in a shallow pass that something is currently walking down.

A cut in the rock too wide to jump and too deep to see the floor of. There is water down there, going the same way you are.

Sarn Hollow's line comes in here and runs with yours the rest of the way. The prints in the wet ground are the size of your own.

Where the ground turned to glass and stayed that way. Still warm in places, which after two hundred years is the part that should worry you.

Six villages ring this mountain and their approaches all funnel through the same three miles of broken ground. Everyone knows that. Nobody has ever proposed doing anything about it.

The scrub gives out and the stones start, singly and badly built, a long way short of the field proper. Somebody did not make the last mile and somebody else stopped where they fell.

Several acres of stone piles in no order at all, going back into the scrub until you cannot pick them out from the ground. There are flowers growing out of them.

The scree above the Cairnfield, where the ground starts going up in earnest. No Proofing has ever come this way, because the flower has always been at the bottom.