Grimsdell's Two Places

Grimsdell is the steepest and darkest of the beech hangers of the High South, a long wood clinging to a scarp no plough could ever take. Unlike its neighbours it is cut for the fire rather than the saw: what leaves Grimsdell leaves as charcoal, and the burning families keep their chief hearths among its trees. The smoke hangs in the hollows from spring to autumn, and the ground beneath the beeches is black with the dust of old burns.

The hangers count as the least feared wild ground in the realm, and they earn it by being watched. Woodwards pace their rides daily, each valuable tree is numbered, the bounds are ridden once in three years, and in a wood where a hundred people earn their living nothing is allowed to gather unseen. Yet in Grimsdell there are two places the woodwards will not walk through. Their rides bend aside and pass around them, and no woodward living recalls them ever running straight. No roll explains why, and the woodwards, asked, say only that the ride goes the way it goes.

After dark the only people in the wood are the burners, sitting up with their smouldering stacks through the small hours. They are the ones who know the two places best, and they know them by ear. A burner can tell what each of them sounds like from four hundred yards off, and whether tonight it sounds as it ought. They do not say what they hear. A stranger who has bought charcoal fairly and sits quiet at the hearth may notice that the old men turn their heads now and then toward one dark fold of the hanger, listen a while, and go back to their talk.

Nobody has ever been sent to find out more, and nobody in the hanger country thinks anybody should be.