Grass and Heath
Grass and heath cover most of the open country of Caeldon that no one ploughs. To the herding peoples they are the land’s real harvest: the grass the flocks eat is what makes a meadow, a shelf, or a slope worth holding, and who may graze where is settled by custom, rights, and pact. The grass differs as the country does, from the lush wet meadows of the basin villages to the thin, wind-cut tufts of the Windscar shelves, and where land has been left alone long enough, grass gives way to heath.
Appearance
Meadow grass
The wet meadows of the Confluence Basins grow thick, soft, knee-high grass, bright green after the spring rise and dotted with flowers, sedges, and rushes where the water lies longest. It smells sweet when cut and sour where it is trodden into mud.
Mountain pasture
On the summer slopes of the Headwater Marches and the sheltered valleys of the Ironspine, the grass is short and fine, cropped close by sheep and cattle, studded with small hard flowers and broken by stone. It is green for a few months and buried under snow for the rest.
Shelf grass
The thin grass of the High Scars grows in tough grey-green tufts no higher than a hand, wiry, rough-edged, rooted in cracks and pockets of dust between bare stone. The wind combs it flat. It goes straw-coloured early in the year and stays alive under that colour far longer than it looks.
The flood fringe
In a good year the Long Pan of the Rimward Basins floods ankle-deep and grows a short-lived green fringe: fine, fast grass and low herbs that spring up within days of the water and brown within weeks.
Heath
Heath is low, woody, and tangled, knee-high at most: tough evergreen shrublets with tiny needle-like leaves, purple and pink-flowered in late summer, mixed with coarse grass, bracken, and moss. It grows on poor, acid, long-neglected ground and turns a dull brown-purple in winter. The terraces of the Witnessfields have long gone to grass, heath, and thorn.
Habitat and Range
Grass grows nearly everywhere that has soil and light and is not tilled or wooded. Heath takes over abandoned or worn-out uplands. The two meet on the empty Witnessfields, where the rows of inscribed stones run across heath as far as can be seen and basin herders turn their flocks back at the Grey Line.
Behaviour and Temperament
Grass is resilient if it is left time to recover: grazed down, it regrows from the root. Grazed too hard or too long, it dies back, and on the Windscar shelves bare ground stays bare for years. The High-Scar kindreds graze the shelves until the grass gives out and then move on before the ground is spent. Heath creeps rather than spreads and is slow to give back ground once it holds it.
Life Cycle
Most grass lives on from year to year, regrowing from the root after each grazing and each winter, and flowers in a few weeks of early summer. The shelf grass of the Windscar flowers only after a storm and seeds into cracks in the stone. The flood fringe of the Long Pan lives a few weeks, from seed to seed. Heath lives for decades, grows woody and leggy with age, and is renewed by cutting or burning.
Uses and Dangers
Grass feeds the herds that feed almost every people: sheep and cattle in the hills, the herds of the Orc kindreds on the far side, the livestock grazed in common on basin wet meadows. Cut and dried, it is hay. Heath gives rough grazing, fuel, bedding, and thatch, and its flowers feed bees.
The dangers lie in its scarcity and in fire. On the far side water-and-pasture rights are negotiated between kindreds and held under the Windscar Pacts, and pasture is one of the things raids are made over. For a few weeks after a good flood the Long Pan’s fringe draws every herd within reach and many kindreds camp side by side at Shortgreen. Dry grass catches fire easily, and a grass fire on the open shelves runs before the wind faster than a person can.
Lore and Belief
Orc kindreds speak of grass as something lent, not owned: the shelf lends it, and a kindred that strips it has borrowed what it cannot repay. Children of a camp-ring such as Thingrass learn which shelves are resting by the colour of the tufts. Basin herders say heath grows where an oath has been kept too long, a half-joke about the Witnessfields that few of them would test by crossing the markers.