Ballybegrosh / Breachwood, the Hawthorn Fort's village

[Kiba]

I'm already in-progress with the Hawthorn Fort for my urban-fantasy story, and last night I went "Crap, I need to figure out the layout for the castle's village! They might be the Fair Folk, but even they aren't going to want stuff all over the place. Plus, average fairies aren't going to know the stupendous physics-defying magic that ultra-powerful fairies use."

So I started doodling how it looked in my head. (And then halfway through, I remembered this paper is attached to my castle's map, so FACEPALM. I'll have to trace it onto an entirely new sheet.)

As my scribbles denote: The village has 810 people (150 or so families) and lies a mile off from the Hawthorn Fort. It's fairly large but not too special--the petty-kingdom has a low population thanks to the massive Timberdeep forest in the northern half of the kingdom. The Maygeld Road is four car-lanes wide, but it's basically paved, marked in important places, and well-kept, and that's it. They have more important stuff to worry about than making marble roads with silver street signs.

The village's name is Breachwood because it's in one of the few sizable breaks in the Timberdeep. I translated the meaning into Irish Gaelic a couple days ago, and I hope I didn't butcher anything: "Ballybegrosh" literally means "small passage in/through the woods." The Hawthorn Fort started here because the Timberdeep takes two weeks to travel when the actual distance it covers should only take one. Once you're at the Fort, it's just a few days to one of the major rivers.

They have a couple of wells, a mill, a baker, a smith, and a tanner. The tanner is all the way by the pastures, since there are extensive accounts in medieval times that tanning makes a horrible stench. There's a small inn by the green, but most people are fine with letting you stay at their home if you're just passing through or don't have money for the inn.

The farms are on an open-field system since my Fair Folk are heavily Stone and Bronze Age in society, so one field would have 3-5 farmers working on bits of it instead of being owned by one person. Similarly, the pastures are shared by three to five people since they wouldn't have hundreds of head of livestock each, and the village green is for people who only have a few animals. (Also, I miscounted the pastures--there's 12, not 11. Shh. )

So that makes 27-36 farming families and 36-60 herding families. That means 63-96 families are "officially" farmers and herders who need an actual field/pasture, while other villagers would have small plots of land or two or three animals that are fine with the village green or browsing in the forest. They know magic that multiplies crop yields and preserves food, and in-story that's obviously helped them become masters of agriculture, so half to two-thirds of a village being farmers/herders as opposed to 70-100% seems reasonable for me.

One frustrating thing is that I can't find any maps of villages! Either the village maps are the usual "cluster of houses surrounded by fields," or they're Late Middle Age villages. And English. Or worse yet, they're shiny-happy fantasy maps that look pretty but aren't helpful at all.

[Larb]

Looks like an interesting start! And yes, tanning was pretty smelly - the skin is soaked in a big vat of urine at one point so well.. yes. Tallow making was another smelly trade. Making dyes is another trade that involves the use of urine. Those sorts of trades often got clumped together in one area in larger places.

What period village maps are you trying to track down? I might have something I can dig up.

[Kiba]

Stone Age, Bronze Age, or maybe early Iron Age Irish villages are what I've been looking for, but I can only find pictures of individual roundhouses. Early medieval villages are cool, too.

Also, thanks for the note about dye-making and tallow-making! A potful of modern dye for a couple of shirts smells pretty icky, so I can't imagine what the smell of gallons of dye made from plants is like.

[Larb]

You tend to find less "maps" amd more archaeological diagrams of sites. I'm not very familiar with ancient Irish settlements but I know there are some good examples in Scotland and Cornwall because they were often dry stone so the foundations survive. Places like Chysauster and Carn Euny are worth looking up, and so are the various Brochs which often have the remains of settlements around them. But they always seem like quite small sites. Or larger fortified ones on hills. But they do seem to mainly be clusters of houses surrounded by fields.

Also Galicia in spain has some interesting celtic sites which partially survive. Similar to cornish ones.

[J.Edward]

Looks like a good start to the village.
I do the same thing - have one map going and then realize that I need to do another map as it would relate to this one.
In fact, I'm doing that right now with Haerlech. I realized I needed to know what the surrounding area was like so I've been having to do that map as well.

Your locations are very well thought out.

[Kiba]

You tend to find less "maps" amd more archaeological diagrams of sites. I'm not very familiar with ancient Irish settlements but I know there are some good examples in Scotland and Cornwall because they were often dry stone so the foundations survive. Places like Chysauster and Carn Euny are worth looking up, and so are the various Brochs which often have the remains of settlements around them. But they always seem like quite small sites. Or larger fortified ones on hills. But they do seem to mainly be clusters of houses surrounded by fields.

Also Galicia in spain has some interesting celtic sites which partially survive. Similar to cornish ones.

Well, that definitely explains why I can't find anything. Thanks for the pointers--I'll look up Scottish and Cornish Iron Age settlements.

As for updates, I decided to compromise on the Stone/Bronze/Iron Age roots. The topmost core of 25 roundhouses are where the original Iron-Age village started, which would have been converted from wood into stone or brick as time went on. I also added a dyer and a tallow-maker near the tannery.

The rest of the village has square houses that would become increasingly medieval, probably brick/stone and mortar since my notes say this region has a lot of clay deposits and the village itself has three bricklayers. There's probably a few potters around the village, but they wouldn't be making fine porcelain and china--more like basic tableware, pots, and roofing/floor tiles for the better-off villagers.

And as I thought, I need to do both maps again. I cut the maps of the village and the castle apart so I didn't always have to unfold three sheets, and now the cut pieces are just weird. On the plus side, I didn't butcher the Irish name! There's dozens of towns with "ballybeg" somewhere in the name.

[Kiba]

Another update! I made the village green about 40x30 acres for scale, and then I had to shift a lot of stuff around while figuring out the demographics.

-There are 89 houses instead of 90 now, but that's cool. I thought I'd get the numbers way more messed up, so yay! I'm thinking the house shapes aren't just the literal houses--about a third to half of them have a small to medium plot of land, either for a barn/shed or for a garden (frequently both).

-The people who keep livestock are obviously near the green and the pastures. The little clusters of homes surrounded by the pastures aren't that well-off, since they're so far away from the main village. The four small fields are 10-15 acres and the four large ones are 30-40 acres, so with about 2-3 acres per family, that makes 50-73 farming families.

-The pastures are now consolidated. The goat/sheep pasture is around 70 acres long and 10 acres wide at the largest part; the horse pasture is 40x5 acres; the cow pasture is about 40x20 acres. They're divided in half into summer and winter pastures, so assuming an acre per one or two horses/cows and an acre per 4-6 sheep/goats, you've got 160-240 sheep/goats, 30-60 head of cattle, and 25-50 horses. Half the village green (35 acres) would house another 17-35 head of cattle/horses and 70-100 head of goats/sheep, so the village's livestock would be around 300-485 head total. Draft-horses and oxen are rented out to others by their owner.

Whoever read through the info-dump I posted, congratulations! This is what I have to do when I'm figuring out locations in my writing!

[Kiba]

More updates! Shifted more stuff around, added about ten houses, and added an orchard. Don't mind my scribbles or the line where the two pages were taped together.

And apparently, I have a really hard time striking a balance between "realistic patterns of settlement growth" and "THAT IS NOT A STRAIGHT LINE" or "THESE BITS ARE TOO CLOSE/FAR."

[Kiba]

Well, since both this map and the Hawthorn Fort are both WAY too gray and messy from all the erasing, I think it's time to draft new copies in the next couple of days.

[Kiba]

And my map of the village has been transferred to new paper!

There are now 102 houses, and some of them were shifted around.