City Plan: Eldhaven#

Using the plan. Drag to move, and zoom with the mouse wheel, the + and − buttons, or a pinch. Names come in as you zoom, each set lettered to read at the same size on screen:

• Whole town: the Hedge, the river, the districts and the old Holds.
• About 2½ times: the dray-roads and the great buildings.
• About 6 times: the longer streets and the smaller places.
• About 12 times: the name of nearly every street.

The ⤢ button fills the screen. North is up, and the scale bar bottom left is always true.

The town at a glance#

A Hold grown into a town#

Chapter III lays out every Hold the same way (04:70–75): "The Hold-house at the centre: the Moot hall, granary and ember shelter", family houses round it, "Seeded fields in a ring", then the Hedge, "a cleared, burnt and patrolled boundary strip, 200–500 m wide" (04:72), and the Wild beyond. The plan draws Eldhaven as that pattern grown large:

• The Old Hold is the first Hold. The Compact House stands at its centre in its fire-ring: "a cleared fire-ring of 60 m around every Hold-house" (04:138). Beside it is the Old Moot Hall, the first Hold's own Hold-house.
• The old Holds round about are Wellholm, Draymoot, Seedholt, Coldspring, Riftby and Wolfring. The town has grown out and taken them in, and each keeps its Hold-house in its fire-ring.
• The seeded fields fill the ring between the town and the Hedge. Some Holds sold their fields for houses and some never did, so estates and fields lie side by side (see How the streets are named).
• The Hedge runs round the whole town, cleared and burnt. The plan makes it 350 m wide; the canon allows 200–500 m (04:72). The dray-roads cross it at the Hedge posts.
• The Wild lies beyond it: emberscrub, native growth that no one eats.
• The Fire Ring is a wide avenue round the old town, 36 km long, a fire line of the kind the Guild's work-frames clear (51:301).

Getting around#

• The Rift Railway runs through the town: "The Rift Railway, AL 1890s, runs 3,200 km through the Eldvang rift and is the frontier's spine." (04:111) It is "the frontier's one railway" (27:190). Eldhaven Station and the dray yards are proposals.
• The dray-roads (canon: "Holds are linked by dray-roads and by the rift railway", 04:75). The plan names four for where they go:
  • the Stavholm road, north up the rift toward the railway's northern end;
  • the Ember Crossing road, south toward the railway's southern depot;
  • the Highland road, east toward the Highland Reach;
  • the Charterlands road, west over the river toward the Crown Charterlands "just west of the rift" (26:122).
• Air. It is nine hours by air from Aletheia to Eldhaven, at Cr 640 (27:192). No airport is named in the canon. The plan proposes Eldhaven Airfield inside the Hedge to the north-east.
• Water. Only the Rift river crosses the sheet. The Holds reach the sea through Oathwater Quay and the coastal Holds' quays (27:193), far to the north.

Landmarks#

Canon places are marked canon. Their position on the plan is a proposal unless the text gives it.

How the streets are named#

• streets are often numbered;
• famous people, leaders above all, get streets, and those streets sit together;
• an estate takes a theme, such as flowers;
• many streets keep the name of whoever first laid the road;
• some streets simply stop at a field whose owner never sold, and the suburbs have their cul-de-sacs.

In Eldhaven the rules take this form:

• The leaders' streets sit together. The Speakers of the Compact ring the Compact House. Frontier names follow the Gift-line: "a given name and the line of the founding Gift-mother" (26:215). A street takes the given name alone: Nell Street, Birk Lane.
• The lanes keep their founders' given names, as a frontier family would say them: Corra's Lane, Runa's Lane, Yara's Lane.
• The old Holds keep their own streets: Moot Street, Granary Street, Wind-tower Street, Cistern End.
• Estates were built on the fields that sold, each with a theme:
  • the moons (Hedge Moon Road, Green Moon Drive);
  • the Gift-lines (Adaeze Road, Nkemdi Drive);
  • herbs (Fennel Drive, Yarrow Close);
  • birds (Curlew Drive, Finch Court);
  • the harvest (Buckwheat Road, Honey Road);
  • Kethra's native life (Gloamwing Road, Emberscrub Road);
  • frontier words (Hedge Court, Peace Court).
• Fields whose Holds never sold are still sown, with the estates on every side.
• No "Stair". No street in Eldhaven is called a Stair. The frontier calls the north "the Stair" (26:45), and a Stair would read as northern.
• No numbered district. Eldhaven has none; its planned streets are named for the dray and the railway.
• Every street longer than 80 m has a name: 4,335 of 4,540. In the old town each name is used once. The estates may repeat a name found far off, never within 6 km or in the same locality.

The names avoid everything the naming rules and the canon forbid:

• Nothing is taken from Earth's places or history (05:266).
• No new name uses the crowded families: "-gate", "-mere", "Salt-", "Grey-" and "Hollow-".
• The Brenna line has no street, because the canon's Brannock group crowds it.