The old Thalrun ring road where it leaves Greyhearth, climbing the mountain shoulder and running east across open moorland. Built before the Withering, never broken, and lately re-cleared, it is safe, waymarked ground the whole way to the Crossway.
The Thalrun built roads the way they built everything, as an argument with time they intended to win. The High Road climbs out of Greyhearth on paving two carts wide, held to the mountainside by a retaining wall that has shifted one block in two centuries, past the quarry that supplied its stone and a roofless watchtower whose windows still mind the road in both directions. Two hundred Turnings of weather have rounded its edges and moved nothing.
Off the shoulder the road runs east across open moor on a raised causeway, and the country changes register. Waymark stones pace the verge at bowshot intervals, set so a traveler in mist can walk marker to marker and never leave the line. Old peat cuttings stand full of black water on either side, spade marks still clean in the trench walls, turf stacks still waiting for cutters who never came back for them. A boundary stone marks where the moor gives way to fell country, carved with mountain marks on one face and a plain cross on the other, two peoples agreeing on an edge.
The returners cleared the road expecting to need it, and they were right. It is the long way to Willowdale, spoken of in Greyhearth with some pride that there is a long way again, and it carries a traveler safe and dry to the Crossway inn where the fells begin. What stands off the road, the tower, the quarry, the pools that never ripple, is not part of the road, and the waymark stones point firmly along the paving.
