North Downs

The North Downs are the high, open sheep hills that close the wool country of the High South, the far edge of a belt of grazing that runs from the Chalk Wold across to them. The flocks on them have never been counted and nobody pretends they could be. Their fleece goes down into the clip of the south, which is the largest single trade in the southern half of the realm, gathered from hundreds of small holdings that cannot grade or sell a bale on their own and must send it to the halls to be judged and sealed.

Across the Downs run the drove roads, the oldest ways in the belt. They are not roads as a carter understands the word but broad grassed rights of passage, unmetalled and mostly unhedged, laid out for beasts that move slowly and in numbers and graze as they go. The drover courts of Sarrum keep them, and keep them hard: trespass, disease, fouled springs, the order in which two herds meet, the price of a village's eaten crop. Their sittings are short and their fines heavy, and a man barred from the road has no trade by the next season, so their word is obeyed by duke, bishop and Collegium alike.

Under the droves lie older lines still. The ridgeways keep to the dry crests and step around every spring and soft hollow more cleverly than any modern surveyor could, and the drovers use them daily without any notion why they run where they do. Barrows stand on the high ground and are let alone, not from piety but because opening them has a long record of going badly. When the plough turns up worked flint, a shard or an old coin, it goes to the parish, which keeps a share for the finder.

The Downs folk guard their water above all. A carcass in a sinkhole or a midden set in the wrong place on the tops may turn up in a village spring below, and shepherds who would think nothing of a night on the open hill will walk a mile out of their way rather than water a flock at a pond they do not know.