Great Ashen

Great Ashen grew up on the southern droves to serve the herds that walked from the southern shires to the capital, and it did so for as long as there had been a capital to walk to. It never had much land and never needed it. Alison Frane's account of the village lists six trades, and every one of them lived on movement: an inn, a smith, a wheelwright, a pair of carriers, the standings where beasts were penned overnight, and a woman whose whole work was feeding drovers. With Marlow Bridge and Stone Pyle, its fellows on the same road, it held perhaps nine hundred people in 4570.

In 4574 the through line was completed, and within about eight years the capital trade had left the droves. A beast on the iron arrived the next day in condition; a beast on the road lost nine days' weight. In 4576 the Great Ashen drover Symon Gall complained that the good beasts had stopped coming two years after the line opened and that only stock too poor to pay the rate still walked, and by 4590 even that better trade was gone. Drove court fees fell between 4574 and 4600 by about two thirds. The young went to Sarrum or to the pits; the old stayed. The three villages now hold about four hundred between them, and Great Ashen has had no working smith since 4589, its forge cold and turned into a byre.

Nothing happened to Great Ashen, and that is its whole story. Alison Frane told a vestry, and had it minuted, that no one had come since no one had died; the belt does not count a lost trade as a disaster as it counts a flood or a fever. The county remains bitter that the shires helped pay for the line that emptied their own villages. One loss has never been measured. Two of the three drove villages kept crossing stones on the road, and the households that tended them were among the families that left. Nobody wrote down who kept the stones at Great Ashen. Marget Sperrin records that the stones still stand and that nothing has happened, but that valley people have twice asked her whether anything has.

Great Ashen is a village built for more traffic than it now sees: wide verges, empty standings, and a quiet inn. Bring your own farrier. No company has gone to look at the crossing stones in fifty years; one that does should ask the old people who stayed rather than anyone in Sarrum.