Old-town
Old-town, as may already have been surmised, is the oldest part of Bree, rising above the Road on the lower slopes of the Hill. The houses here all have windows looking west and are made from stone. Some stand two or even three storeys tall. The tallest are the home of crafters – weavers, dyers, leather-workers – and have workshops on the ground floor. Others are owned by wealthy farmers who own large portions of the countryside around the village. The folk of Old-town are notoriously snobbish towards ‘blow-ins’ and ‘rustics’, so if you haven’t lived in Bree since before the days of the kings, you’re simply not ‘quality’. They don’t extend this prejudice to travellers on the road; Old-town has always prospered from traffic and trade.
The best-known landmark in Old-town is the town well,sunk deep into the hillside to bring up good water even when other streams run dry. It’s considered lucky for a traveller departing Bree to take a drink from the well just before leaving; since the beer in The Pony is always brewed with water from this well, the luck surely holds if the traveller has one more for the road. The town well is also where youths from Bree gather in the hopes of signing on as caravan-guards and hired hands with merchants heading off along the Road. A young Bree-lander can earn more on a single trip to the Blue Mountains than in a year of work on a farm; Dwarves drive a hard bargain, but they pay in gold and silver.
Another common sight in Old-town are the Cellar-hobbits. When Hobbits first settled in Bree, some of them rented the cellars of human homes to live in. This became a tradition, where two families, Big and Little, share the same building. Often, the two families share responsibilities and chores; for example, the Sheafwheat family grow the wheat and mill it into flour, while the Greenbanks in their cellar are the bakers who turn that flour into the best bread in Bree.
NPC's:
Type
Neighbourhood
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