Road and way · Feral ground · The High South
The Keepers' Paths
Past the line at Oxford's edge the true marsh begins; three kept causeys cross it, and beside them run an unknown number of ways the keepers use and never make public. To leave the causeys kills, and nobody works the meres after dark.
- Within
- Oxford Marsh
- Named in
- Book III
History and lore
Beyond the line at Oxford's edge the reclaimed fields end and the true marsh begins: reed, carr and black water with no fixed shore. Three causeys cross it, raised banks of clay and faggot that the parishes rebuild every year and the Causey Wardens of Saint Frideswide keep lit and counted. Everybody knows the rule about them. Step off a causey and the marsh will have you.
Everybody also knows that the causeys are not the only ways across. Alongside them, threading the reed beds and the alder carr, run other paths that the lantern keepers use and never show. How many there are nobody outside the keeping households can say. They are not marked, they are not on any map the chapter holds, and they move, as everything in the marsh moves, so that a keeper must know which stretch has shifted since last season before he trusts his weight to it.
A keeper may take a traveller by one of them in great need, walking ahead and saying nothing, and the traveller will afterwards be unable to find the way again. Nobody uses them after dark, keepers included, and nobody works the open meres once the light goes. The marsh people say a hidden path is only a path for the man who already knows it; for anyone else it is simply the marsh.
Where the volumes speak of it
- B3 10.1
