The Vale Was Never Empty

Travel accounts repeatedly mention the same pattern: a settlement grows where two routes meet, prospers for a generation, and then disappears from later maps while the crossing itself remains.

Some chroniclers took this as evidence of war. Others blamed floods, exhausted ground or simple migration. The surviving fragments are too incomplete to settle the argument. What can be said is that the Vale seems to have outlived many of the names once imposed upon it.

Even now, old boundary stones can be found beside roads whose destinations are no longer recorded. Their markings differ from place to place. Several have been moved. At least according to one cartographer, some may never have marked borders at all.

Field note: Marker lies south of the crossing, face turned toward the river. Villagers call it a border stone. No one agrees which border.

Later hand: Do not use for measurement. It stood uphill in my father's time.

The stone still appears in later copies as if its position were fixed. That is the problem with records of the Vale: certainty often arrived after the people who knew better were gone.