The Settlements
Brindol
Brindol is the great city of the western vale, walled and proud above its river, ringed by orchards and grainfields and the farming villages that feed it. It is the largest and safest town for many days' road, its market square loud with trade, its temples to the New Gods standing tall, its streets kept in good order by the Lion Guard. It is the seat of Jarl Adalric, a fair and soldierly man his people are glad to follow. East of here the Dawn Way runs on through settled, peaceful country. West, past the last of the farms, the road grows wilder.
Renwick
Renwick is a small walled town a short way west of Brindol, the first walled town past the great city and the place where the settled east gives way to the rougher middle vale. It lives by timber. The town stands within a day's haul of the eaves of the Witchwood, and its sawpits, woodyards, and charcoal-burners turn the great wood's oak and ash into beams, planks, and char that go east to Brindol and beyond.
It is a town of timber in every sense: a wall and gate of stout logs, streets of timber houses, stacked lumber and the smell of fresh-cut wood and woodsmoke over everything, and the slow creak of the ferry on the Erland that floats the logs down from the hills. The Witchwood itself looms close at hand, dark and old and ill-famed, a wood the woodcutters work only at its margins and the druids hold sacred; the folk of Renwick keep one eye always on its eaves.
Renwick has lately passed to Lady Romilda, Thane of Renwick, a high-spirited young woman home from her wandering to take her late father's seat, her bold notions reined in by an old and cautious council. East lies Brindol and the safer country; west and south the road runs on into the wilder vale.
Highfold
Highfold is a tiny hamlet where the Dawn Way comes down out of the Dwarf Hills, the last real stop before the road climbs away into high country. It is a humble place: a loose scatter of timber-and-thatch cottages along the road, a green and a well at its heart, woodsmoke rising, with orchards of apple, pear, and chestnut sheltered on the slopes below and flocks grazing the high pastures above.
It has no wall. The one strong building, and the reason the hamlet grew where it did, is the Cross-Eyed Ogre, a great walled roadhouse with a stout gate, a long bunkroom, and a leering painted ogre's head over the door. When raiders come down out of the hills, this is where everyone on the road shelters. Set a little apart on a low rise is the hall of Thane Eadric, and among the cottages stand the small things of hamlet life: a cider-house, a smithy with its forge-glow, and a little shrine of the New Gods beside a far older standing stone.
Highfold looks to Jarl Adalric of Brindol for its law and its protection, though so far up the road the jarl's reach is a thin and distant thing. Beyond the hamlet the Dawn Way climbs on into the Dwarf Hills, and the country grows lonelier with every mile.
Irongard Motte
Irongard Motte is a dusty, hard-working town at the dry western end of the vale, living by iron, cattle, and leather. An old mine bites iron from the eastern slopes, and the smelter's grey smoke hangs always over the rooftops; the stockyards at the town's edge churn with beasts and drovers on market days; and the foul-smelling tanneries sit downwind in the eastern hills, where nobody cares to live.
It is a town of timber gathered below its motte, an old timber motte-and-bailey raised on a mound that is the Thane's hall and the town's last refuge both. Finer than the motte is the stone Council Hall on the square.
The Thane, Hunfrid, is a lord of small means who troubles no one. The roads about the town are bad with brigands, and as one of the westernmost towns of the vale, Irongard Motte is among the first a threat out of the west would reach.