The overgrown crossing between Willowdale's western fields and the foot of the Greymounts follows the old road to the mountains, and its track still runs from the last field wall to a cleft in the mountain face.
West of the tilled fields the hedges stop, and the country between the farmland and the mountains belongs to itself. The track that crosses it was a road once, part of the highway that carried Thalrun ore down to the lowlands in the age of the Spreading Boughs, and ninety Turnings of thicket and stone have narrowed it without quite managing to close it. It climbs through blackthorn and briar and then over open stony rises, past a single waymark cairn, to the foot of the mountain walls.
Travelers walk it because it is the way west. Nobody lives along it, and between the farm walls and the mountains the only built thing is that cairn of flat stones at a bend in the track. Since Greyhearth relit its hearths the track has seen more boots than it had in ninety Turnings, and the worn line through the growth is slowly becoming a path again, which is how the old roads came back the first time.
