Goose down lies along the Jaracenda road in drifts, caught on thorn and in the wheel ruts, and every rut is cut to the same depth because the carts all carry the same load of wicker cages. A mile on, white petals replace the down. The road runs between two hedges of hawthorn, and then the hedge simply goes on and curves, with no break in it but one arched gate. This is Wickerlow, about nine hundred people on twelve acres, set where the Pellam can be forded.
Greta Oake starts her market day in the dark by feeding her geese cracked barley in the lane behind her house. By full light she has six cages stacked on a handcart and is pushing it through the gate. Her upper floor leans to within an arm's reach of the neighbor's, and she passes a pot of cider-slick straw across the gap each morning without looking. In the fieldstone square she sets her hurdles, trades two geese for a bolt of undyed wool, and eats river fish from a leaf. By noon the square is loud and the mill wheel throws green water. Greta does not look up at any of it. She watches the strangers, who are wool buyers from the Tarn Hills, and she sells them nothing she cannot see them pay for.
Visitors get the place wrong. Hill drovers coming down from Vargelinha take the hedge in May for a late bank of snow, and the crooked spire for a lightning-struck tree. Some take the whole settlement for a sheepfold. Residents correct none of this. They will not sell a cutting of the hedge, though a hawthorn twig is worth nothing anywhere else, and they will not lend a hurdle or a cage after dusk. I asked Greta why. She said the gate is shut at the evening meal and a stranger left outside is not addressed by name until morning. The reason was not offered, and I did not press.
I took two measurements. With a hazel rod cut to the length of my arm span I found the hedge three spans thick at the base. From the chapel loft I let down a plumb line weighted with a river pebble, and the spire's lip hangs forty-one inches off true, all of it toward the Tarn Hills. I left at the fourth hour after noon, through the gate, with a goose feather stuck to my coat. On the Jaracenda road the air was dead still, yet when I turned, every column of chimney smoke over the slates was leaning the same way, toward the hills.
- Classification
- Market settlement behind a hawthorn hedge
- Habitat
- River fords and road crossings
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- about 900 people on 12 acres
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Lowland farms and river country
- Binomial
- Oppidum pontanum
- Diet
- Grain, wool, cider, and river fish
- Temperament
- Busy, wary of strangers after dark