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ankulometes · 1 year ago

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The Travellers, Vol 12, Pt 4: The First Century

It is the year 106 “anno mundi”, recorded in the team’s base-12 numeral system as 8Ʌ AM. There are now 566 people living at Caer Hywen, of which 112 are as yet unsubstituted, natural born children below the age of 12. The remainder are all still variants. It will be another two centuries before that ceases to be the case. The settlement has really come along. In a decade or so, they will have a surplus population and a couple of hundred of the inhabitants will leave to set up a new community.

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Surprising as it may seem, the team have not interacted with a single native inhabitant since they arrived. Britain is a sufficiently large island that traversing the whole thing on foot is a major undertaking at this time. The hunter-gatherers simply have no need to hike all the way down to Land’s End and the variants have no need to travel elsewhere either. There were groups based around the Somerset Levels and the Isle of Wight who mainly exploited the marshy coastlines of those regions and they often travelled as far west as Dartmoor and Bodmin on a seasonal basis to hunt game and visited the north coast of the peninsula to obtain and work flint but there was little to draw them any farther from home. There had once been a small group based near Caer Hywen around Boskenna but they had long since either died out or abandoned the site as sea levels rose.

The entire area around Caer Hywen had been completely transformed over the course of the team’s first century in situ. This was especially true of an area of around 2,000 acres that stretched from what would be known in MOT as Long Rock and Perranuthnoe which they had been actively cultivating.

Extensive pastures and meadows had been assarted out of the hinterlands of the settlement. Each of the 24 farms had about 14-15 acres allocated outside the defensive perimeter that encircled the core of Caer Hywen, on which they mainly tended to graze cattle or used to make hay. These assarted spaces were interspersed with managed woodlands.

The forestry team had cultivated misty and mysterious carrs of alder and willow around the marshes and rivers. Aside from being a valuable source of wood for boats, baskets, and buildings, they provided a valuable habitat for numerous bird species and crawled with a variety of reptiles and amphibians. One could only navigate much of their expanse along causeways the variants had built for the purpose.

On the exposed rocky headland at Perranuthnoe near the far end of their territory lay a pinewood filled with Scots Pine, Yew, Silver Birch, Aspen, Rowan, and Juniper. Red squirrels darted from tree to tree, and you could regularly see wildcats and pine martens. This landscape segued into a birchwood carpeted with bluebells, violets, and anemones.

Between these lay dark and shady broadleaf woods populated by Oak, Ash, and Beech with an understorey of Hazel. The forest floor, strewn with leaves and dead wood, teemed with a huge variety of mosses, lichen, and fungi that supported a similarly diverse range of insects and lepidoptera. Woodpeckers hammered at the tree trunks that also provided a roost for bats. Hedgehogs shuffled through the litter while badgers and foxes dug sets into the roots.

In various places there are a good number of trees that an educated observer would quickly recognise as introduced species. Among these are Walnut and Laburnum as well as what looks like a kind of Mulberry. They are all being carefully cultivated for several purposes. The “mulberry” in particular, which they call Bwabren, is a species they have specifically engineered for the desirable properties of its wood for the manufacture of flat-faced laminated recurve bows. Similarly, they use the Laburnum wood to make rather less sophisticated D-profile hunting bows. As for the Walnut, its wood was nice for decorative work, but more important were its oil-rich nuts and medicinal leaves.

Beyond these nearby managed projects, various members of the team had endeavoured to keep the game trails and open grasslands clear using a range of techniques to hold back the encroaching forest. This had helped to foster herds of larger wild fauna that were seriously endangered by habitat loss in the region. From the Cassiel satellite imagery, you could clearly see their impact throughout Penwith. As a result, the moorlands along the north coast around Pendeen were home to good-sized herds of the small native equines, bovines, and elk.

From the air, you could also easily discern the various paths that the variants had been treading over the past century. As they approached the perimeter defences of Caer Hywen, they became ever more clearly delineated, even constituting gravelled roads in places. On the embankment itself, the original bare palisade fence had been consumed by the now mature Holly and Hazel hedge that was about 15 feet high and presented a substantial obstacle to any creature bigger than a hedgehog. The frames of the five gates had become entwined within, and strengthened by, living trees. Beside the gates, and at intervals along the length of the perimeter hedge, wooden gantries and lookout posts had been constructed on the interior side of the embankment. The ditches that had been dug along the exposed outer stretches had been incorporated into a sophisticated water and sewage system and were filled with clean water at almost all times of the year as it cycled into and out of the settlement.

On passing through any of the gates and ascending uphill along one of the approach roads to the centre of the settlement, you enter an initial zone of intensive grain, vegetable, and fruit cultivation. Each of the 24 farms had around 14-15 acres allocated for their use in this area, and the farmsteads were clustered in groups of four to facilitate the sharing of tools, infrastructure, and labour. Fields of around 2 to 3 acres in size were mainly being farmed on a 6-year rotation using no-till methods that utilised intercropping and companion planting for weed, pest, and disease control.

Much as the bare fence around the perimeter was now a thing of the past, the fields were typically defined by mature hedgerows lined with nitrogen-fixing species of trees and intertwined with shrubs that provided a feast of berries. Their cultivars and cultigens had come a long way over the course of a century and they had well adapted strains of wheat, rye, barley, oats, sorghum, flax, hemp, rape, hops, peas, beans, mustard, clover, beet, chard, carrots, leeks, onions, garlic, asparagus, chicory, lettuce, cucumber, apples, pears, raspberries, red, white, and blackcurrants, strawberries, blackberries, cherries, plums, and grapes, along with various herbs and dyestuffs that were either delicious or useful and generally yielded well. In a similar manner, their selective breeding programme had provided them with domesticated breeds of horses, goats, sheep, cows, pigs, ducks, geese, and pigeon that could be used for a variety of purposes from beasts of burden to meat or dairy production.

As you travelled through this intensive farming zone, you would be able to see the variants using many types of simple machinery to ease their tasks or moving good-sized loads around on Chinese-style wheelbarrows, sometimes driven by a sail or drawn by a small mule-like horse, or larger consignments of heavier materials using two or four-wheeled carts powered by one or two oxen. Farmers might be accompanied by a few eager, attentive, and agile shepherd dogs on their way out to the pastures while domesticated cats sunbathe or hunt for rodents in the long grass that is being trimmed by a herd of goats. You might be passed by a small crew of hunters, foragers, or foresters riding out on horseback with saddles, reins, and stirrups, possibly with a pack of long-limbed, soft-mouthed hounds. Or perhaps they are miners or quarrymen heading off in a large four-wheeled cart to continue excavations in a bell or clay pit they are working on nearby.

To either side of this well-surfaced road are ditches to accommodate water runoff. Most of the rainwater is eventually captured for various purposes, such as irrigation, but everything eventually gets fed through the sewerage system of reed beds and filtration tanks that are used to clean the outgoing black and grey water from the settlement before it is fed into one of the nearby marshes. Underneath your feet, buried a foot or so underground, are miles of terracotta pipes that are being used to supply fresh water to the outlying farmsteads. Toward the centre of the settlement on the crest of the headland, you can see the sails of a few wind-powered structures. One of these is clearly a water tower that is pumping up water into its tank to feed this gravity-powered distribution system. Obviously, it has its limitations, but it serves their needs well on the whole. If winter storms smash the rigging or a high-pressure front in summer stills the wind for an extended period, they can always hook up some oxen or horses to power it for a bit if need be.

Caer Hywen is not a big place, and you soon reach the centre. Here there is a cluster of about 72 houses arrayed along stone-paved streets that radiate from the central square and marketplace. The ditches now give way to covered cobblestone pavements lined with fruit trees. Each dwelling is customised to the individual needs of its inhabitants, but they nonetheless follow a broadly similar pattern and typically utilise the same construction techniques and materials. Most consist of a rectangular block about 10 x 5 metres with its longer side facing the street. This is abutted to a similarly sized block at the rear to create an L-shape. The plot extends out behind this such that it is about 10 x 30 metres in size and is capable of containing any necessary outbuildings along with a small garden for growing fruit, vegetables, and herbs.

These rearward spaces do not generally have clearly delineated plot boundaries. Nevertheless, they can usually be discerned by virtue of the fact that collections of trellises, walls, and outbuildings have sprung up within them to create heat sinks, sun traps, wind breaks, or shaded spots for various plants or to service other needs and activities. They have a tendency to suggest borders and provide some private outdoor space within what otherwise remains an open, communal garden and work area.

The main housing blocks are single-storey affairs constructed in local stone. Roofed in turf interspersed with bird boxes and bat roosts, they sprout into a glorious technicolour display of wildflowers in spring to the accompaniment of thousands of birds.

The team have recently started making glass at Caer Hywen, but most buildings are still unglazed and rely on wooden shutters to keep out the elements in winter. Fortunately, the climate will be rather good for at least another 2,000 years so this isn’t too much of a hardship.

The L-shaped dwellings are mainly for craftspeople, so the street-facing block is generally “open” since it functions as a workshop or similar. The rear block is where they live and those who have separate specialist places of work might only have this on a 5 x 30 metre plot. They provide a cosy and comfortable living space that is well-insulated against temperature extremes, despite being open to the rafters. Beneath the outer stone skin, there is an underlayer of hempcrete blocks. The external oak shutters fit snugly to the window frames, while a tripartite leather, wool, and linen internal curtain arrangement allows for varying degrees of light and weather exclusion depending on the time of day and season. The roof is lined with bitumen sheets and alder to provide waterproofing beneath the thick layer of turf that shields the house from anything the skies can hurl.

In the interior, battens and willow lathes are attached to the walls and coated with clay plaster. This envelops a single kitchen-dining-living space with mezzanines at either end for sleeping. It provides a sizable wood-fired oven and hearth for heating and cooking. Water is available on tap (most of the time) and the oven is also designed to heat this at need. Every home has bathing and washing facilities, and these acts also typically take place in this single room. The floor is paved with stone or clay tiles over aggregate that is laced with tiny clay pipes. The oven also heats water that is run through these pipes, providing an additional system of radiant underfloor heating when needed. You can easily maintain a comfortable interior temperature year-round with a minimal expenditure of either fuel or effort. Not that it matters too much since most of the inhabitants spend most of their time outdoors anyway.

Attached to the main block, usually in a small lean-to structure on the north side of the building, can be found a small suite of service rooms containing a cool store or “buttery”, a dry store or “pantry”, and a waterless composting toilet facility with a kind of bidet next to it. These are all pretty functional, and there are strict limits to how often the toilet can be used, but they do their jobs well. And, if you do need to wipe, they have a surfeit of low-grade paper available which they manufacture from a mix of flax, hemp, rape, shives, and recycled material.

Caer Hywen is little more than a small village by modern standards, so you soon reach the centre. This has changed beyond all recognition from the scrubby patch of grassland fringed by a collection of hastily assembled stone dwellings we last saw in year five.

The sapling the team planted at its centre is now a handsome tree. It is still youthful by the standards of a Yew, but mature. Plas Hywen, as it is called, is now about 60 x 40 metres in size, albeit somewhat irregular and rounded in shape, like an avocado, as it follows the lines of the hill atop which it sits. As is the case with all the streets in the centre, its circumference is bounded by a well-gravelled road fringed by pavements under which run sewerage and water services.

The central space is all beautifully paved in dressed cobblestones of local granite and encircled with a ring of apple, cherry, and plum trees. There are also raised beds at several points, similarly constructed from granite, that are planted with fragrant herbs and flowers and double up as places to sit.

Arranged in the remaining space around the central Yew tree are a good number of wooden market stalls with tables, benches, and awnings; for Plas Hywen is where the variants gather to exchange the products of their labour and, when the weather is fine, to discuss administrative matters.

On the north side of the square are two buildings that are a good deal larger than any of the dwellings. The first of these is the stone-built water tower, topped by the windmill that we saw from afar which powers a simple pump. The tower itself is round, about 60 to 70 feet tall, and topped by a campanile containing a good-sized bell cast in bronze. Structurally, the tower is constructed from two skins of stone blockwork between which runs a spiral staircase that provides access to the various levels of the wind pump mechanism, the water tank, and the rooftop campanile. The wind pump sail structure itself is a heavy timber frame affair that perches over the top of the campanile such that its axle is free to rotate 360 degrees, as oriented by a tail sail.

Next to the water tower is a sizable public hall that functions as a meeting or market space during inclement weather, an occasional entertainment venue, and a school for their offspring. While its neighbour is an impressive feat of construction and engineering, the hall is beautiful. Its huge, pitched roof is covered in turf, much like most buildings in the settlement, but being almost 20 metres wide facing the square and 60 metres deep, it is far larger and presents its gable to the street. From the ridge line, it plunges down in a festival of grass and flowers to timber colonnades that run along either side of the main body of the building. The gable also frames a portico and balcony on the facade through the application of generous bargeboards. All the timber work is an essay in flowing lines inspired by the forms of nature, replete with intricate tracery, painted in bright colours, and inlaid with gold, silver, and bronze. Rising from the roof ridge above the facade is a small wooden tower. It functions in part as a nesting place for birds, but mainly serves as a clock, since its street facing side is dominated by a large bronze sun and moon dial that is also inlaid with silver, gold, and coloured enamel.

Nestled within this huge wood and turf canopy, the main stone-built body of the building is punctuated with large windows. Further illumination is provided to the interior through regular dormer windows. All are glazed. In the case of the dormer windows, this has been done with stained glass which, in the right light conditions, conducts a polychrome symphony on the tiled floor of the hall’s interior. The hall can be entered from the street front through an impressive set of intricately carved and inlaid double doors. There are also smaller entrances or exits to each side, and two to the rear either side of the platform which sits at the far end of the room. Behind this, at the far end of the building, is an enclosed foyer that constitutes a kind of mirror in enclosed form to the portico and balcony on the street front and provides access via two elegant spiral staircases to the gallery that surrounds the main hall, and via which one reaches the street front balcony.

During the hours of darkness, aside from the firelight of two huge hearths on either side of the hall, the interior can be lit by oil lamps made from glass and brass. Some of these are fitted at regular intervals to the walls. However, the attention grabbers are three large chandeliers that look like constellations of glass and wire orbs in the stylised forms of the sun and moon hanging in space within the hammerbeam roof whose Celtic blue woad-painted vaults are dotted with a plethora of stars inlaid in gold and silver. At both ground and balcony level, every inch of the vertical walls between the windows, doors, and fireplaces are adorned with colourful carved painted stonework in writhing geometric forms and Celtic knots within which are set several mosaics in a similar style that depict figures and scenes from the myths and legends the variants were propagating within their culture. ‘Yr lys mawr’, or “great hall”, as the building is known by the inhabitants, is a masterpiece that has only recently been completed and represents a labour of love that has absorbed most of the community for over a quarter of a century.

On the south side of Plas Hywen are more impressive edifices, albeit somewhat smaller and more modest than those to the north. The first is about double the size of one of their regular houses and is the residence of their brewer, vintner, and distiller, which also serves as a tavern. Many members of the team gather here regularly both to drink and take their meals. It often makes sense to have one place doing the cooking and providing the heating and lighting. Besides which, it’s a lot more fun than shutting yourself up at home.

Next door to the tavern is a good-sized wooden structure with few stone-built appendages. It looks almost Japanese in the way its facade consists entirely of slatted doors that are left open to the elements during the summer months. Inside is a large hot bath, washing facilities, saunas, and steam rooms that are for public use. Much as gathering to eat and drink next door can be both more enjoyable while realising an efficiency gain, the bath house exploits the constant utilisation of fire and hot water by the nearby tavern, bakery, chandlery, forge, and glassworks to provide useful services to the inhabitants that are especially desirable during the winter months. It’s not exactly a 5-star hotel, but it is effectively their own spa. And it is not only for pampering people: it also provides invaluable facilities for washing and drying clothes. It works well. Hunkered with its solid back against the prevailing winds, it is sheltered yet well-ventilated, and as well-lit as it can be while protecting its users from the elements.

The team are all living this world for real, much as they have always done. The variants may all be fundamentally scions of the same person, but their distinct physical forms and varying experiences mean that they are sufficiently individual to require a certain level of social organisation without the need for any pretence or “acting in character”. Indeed, although they remain intimately connected in the way that only Travellers can be, the original four members of the mission team had been divergent individuals for far longer than they had been physically the same person. More important though was the fact that it was vital that the world they were creating was fully rounded and fleshed out.

While every inhabitant of Caer Hywen above the age of 12 was a variant on the diagonal, they had spawned a new horizontal every time they had jumped back to substitute one of their offspring, as was usual in the layered structure of these missions. Their civilisation would continue to exist on these horizontals, becoming completely devoid of variants within a century as those who remained behind died out. Moreover, they would also be sharing the world they were creating with non-variants long before they reached their maximum team size of \~200,000.

In their community of almost 600 individuals, most people still have to do a range of jobs, but they have reached a point where they have begun to specialise to the extent that each person does a particular thing most of the time.

The most important role belongs to the farmers. Far more so than any mining or metallurgical activities, agricultural produce forms the bedrock on which their fledgling economy is based. With twenty-four households dedicated to this area, the farmers also constitute by far the most numerous role in their society.

While everyone has to pitch in on various seasonal jobs, such as the all-important harvest, the farms are designed to be small enough to be managed for most of the year by a single household despite the incredibly intensive nature of their cultivation practices. Over the course of the past century, the team have developed cultivars and cultigens for a wide range of crops. In some cases, they have introduced species, so long as they are native to Western Europe or the Eastern Mediterranean and could conceivably be grown in their current climate and fit the migration backstory of their civilisation. They thus lacked some of their favourites, such as potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, and coffee, and a host of flavoursome spices, but they had everything they needed.

The farmers grow wheat and rye which they harvest, thresh, and winnow to produce straw, chaff, and grain. Some of the grain they retain for planting; the remainder is sold to a miller. The chaff gets sold to a feed, fertiliser, and animal bedding specialist. Similar processes apply to the barley, oats, and sorghum which they also grow. However, a good chunk of the resulting barley grain goes to the brewer, and they use a lot of the oats to bulk out livestock feed. Much of the straw is turned into bales, but some is used to grow mushrooms. Just as the farmers buy in the resulting improved feeds, fertiliser, and bedding, their fungi feed base is augmented by adding in the spent grain that is a byproduct of their brewing and fertiliser manufacturing processes. Sorghum they mainly turn into livestock feed and ethanol, but the fibrous stalks are invaluable for making brooms and brushes.

The farms also produce large quantities of crops that are primarily used to produce fibres and oils. Among these are flax, hemp, rape, nettles, sorghum, and poppies. Typically, these are harvested, retted, and scutched on site to produce bast fibres, seeds, and shives. The fibres are then turned into bales, and most is sold to their textile millers and weavers, of which they have a few because the demand for cloth is incessant. The seed goes to the miller to be cold pressed into oil. The shives and some of the bales are used to make paper. The remaining shives go into the manufacture of animal bedding.

Then there were root crops, which required a lot of labour and soil nutrients to produce but were important to grow on a somewhat larger scale than mere garden crops to provide raw material for several processes, for use in livestock feeds, and to bring variety and nutrients to their diet. In this category, they were cultivating beets, chard, carrots, leeks, onions, garlic, asparagus, chicory, lettuce, and cucumber.

Fruit farming occupied a similar position since almost all clan members were growing some as a garden crop and much was available in the wild. Nevertheless, there were things like apples, pears, raspberries, red, white, and blackcurrants, strawberries, blackberries, cherries, plums, and grapes that they had engineered and consumed on a fairly large scale. Hops also fell into this category.

The variants were not vegans. Although it was mainly oriented around the more expansive and less intensively cultivated hinterlands beyond the perimeter hedge, livestock and dairy farming was just as vital to their community as arable and fruit farming or market gardening. Aside from consuming the meat and dairy produce, they obviously needed things like collagen and bones as well as beasts of burden and transport. Over the course of the past century, their breeding programmes had produced domesticated strains of goats, sheep, cows, and pigs along with some more or less tame tame fowl that included species of ducks, geese, and pigeon. There were no chickens though.

The sheep and goats could be sheared annually to produce valuable wool. Along with some of their cows, they could also be milked regularly. The farmers themselves would then turn this into butter, yoghurt, and cheese on site. The animals that were not needed for either their breeding plans or for dairy were slaughtered. The hides would then be sold on to the team’s tanners while the blood and the carcass would be processed by their butcher. The efficiency with which the crew processed byproducts into livestock feed, combined with their crop rotation strategies and the abundance of pasture, meant that they could easily keep as many animals as they needed over winter.

Last, but by no means least, the farmers all have at least one hive of bees each which they keep in horizontal top-bar hives. Aside from the fact that the honey is obviously delicious to eat, it has several other uses, including in medicine, and the wax is valuable while the bees provide an essential pollination service.

After the farmers, the next most important primary sector role at Caer Hywen belonged to the foresters and woodcutters. They had about ten households dedicated to this task that were clustered in the northwest of the settlement where they could share service and storage buildings along with a wind-powered sawmill. As you might already have ascertained from the descriptions of their work above, they did far more than simply chop down trees.

Aside from activities such as regular coppicing for firewood or planting trees and felling timber for a host of purposes including construction and tool manufacture, they were actively creating and managing a range of environments much as the farmers were. Some of their introduced species were intolerant of the predominantly acidic soils of the region, so there were other regular jobs such as applying wood ash or burned lime to increase its pH levels. Regardless, the result of their activities was minimally processed timber that they sold on to individual households for firewood or secondary processors, including wood workers, the sawmill, or the charcoal maker.

Despite the presence of nearby building stone and ore, wood was the community’s most important fuel and material. The demand for it was incessant and they needed to range their activities over a wide area to satisfy it without undermining the sustainability of their sources. Some of the species they relied on required over a century to reach maturity, so their work demanded careful planning. Along with crops like wheat and their capacity to support livestock, the availability of sustainable sources of timber was one of key elements in determining the range of the community’s area of regular active cultivation, their subsequent perception of the territory to which they were laying claim, and a limiting factor on their potential for population growth.

Next up, of course, came the miners, quarrymen, and clay diggers. The demand for metal and stone was by no means constant and both resources were straightforward to recycle and reuse once extracted. However, it took a hell of a lot of work to do so in the first instance in each case. Moreover, these households were doing far more than merely hewing the ground with picks. In addition to having to prospect decent seams, they were doing a range of manufacturing and processing chores relating to their core specialism, including burning lime, making pozzolans, firing bricks or hempcrete blocks, and dressing stone. In total, there were around twenty households at Caer Hywen, situated in a cluster on the northeastern edge of the settlement centre, who were primarily devoted to this sphere of work. However, because processing stone and ore could generally wait, they were usually among the first people to down tools and help elsewhere whenever the need arose.

What we might call the community’s fishermen and women were another group that fell within what can be modelled as the primary sector of the economy. They had around four households who specialised in this area that were based in the southeast of the settlement around the system of wooden quays and piers that had been constructed in the sheltered head of the creek in what would later become the eastern side of Mount’s Bay in MOT.

These households have a couple of catamarans that provide a stable platform for fishing using either a net or rod, and they will go out several times a week whenever conditions permit. They also farm mussels and oysters and lay traps for lobster and crab. Some is sold fresh to market while much is then smoked, salted, or otherwise preserved for later sale. The seafood they harvest provides a supplement and variety to the diet, but they do not depend on it at Caer Hywen and the consumption of the flesh is among the lesser reasons for their jobs. The chandler will buy up things like fish guts or bones and the shells of crustaceans and bivalves while the tanners are keen to acquire the skins. All can be processed to make things that can only be done with these ingredients.

Even more important than the byproducts of their pisciculture was their responsibility for making salt and collecting kelp. Some of the latter was eaten, but most was sold to the crew’s fertiliser specialist. As for the former, it was obviously vital to everyone. They have a saltern facility just to the east of the isthmus where there is a shallow lagoon within the salt marsh in which the water is exceptionally saline, the sun having already evaporated much of the water. A small wind-powered water lifting device uses an Archimedes screw to take water from this to the saltern where it is reduced until the salt can be extracted and then dried.

Finally, there were the hunters and foragers. The community’s dependence on this kind of activity was by now practically non-existent. They only had a couple of households that did it more or less full time and their jobs might be more accurately described as scout and park ranger. Having a reasonably regular supply of things like venison, wild boar, elk, and aurochs was a luxury they saw no reason to forego, especially since they were creating particularly favourable habitats for some of these species that meant it was a good idea to have a bit of a cull occasionally. Similarly, certain types of wild berries and fungi were plentiful and there was little point cultivating them when a few individuals could just pop out occasionally and pick a load while they were also building or maintaining traps or hides. The small hunting team was also responsible for doing things like conducting controlled burnings to prevent game trails being swamped by pioneer species of trees and shrubs.

Around a third of the inhabitants of Caer Hywen were primarily engaged in activities that might be characterised as belonging to the secondary or even the tertiary sector. The variants working in these areas took the raw materials produced by the farmers, miners, fishers, and hunters and transformed them into processed and manufactured goods. One of the most important among these was the miller.

Currently, the settlement only needs one miller. Their household is located on the eastern edge of the central built-up area next to the farmlands and occupies an oversized plot that is required to safely house the wind-powered mill on-site. For a primitive machine, it is efficient and versatile and covers all of their needs concerning grinding, pressing, and cutting. In the (rare) absence of sufficient wind, it can be powered by horse or oxen.

The miller’s household buys wheat and rye grain from the farmers and turns them into flour and middlings which they then sell on to the baker, the butcher, and individual households. They also buy the seeds of flax, hemp, rape, and poppies (along with the wheat germ obtained from grinding flour) that they press into oil. There are several consumers for these products, in addition to individuals, among whom the most important are the chandler, the derwid, and the livestock feed maker.

Of comparable importance to the miller, occupying the first stage of processing in a vital production chain, are the tanners. There are around four households who primarily occupy themselves with this often somewhat unpleasant task. They obtain their hides and skins directly from the farmers, who slaughter livestock on site, and the fishing folk, along with bark from the woodcutting and foresting team, and transform them into prepared leather which they then sell on, mainly to the leatherworkers. Their houses are located to the east of the settlement centre where the prevailing winds blow away the pungent effects of their work. Several occupations that are water-intensive and produce pollution are located here. The sewerage system will clean this up before releasing it into the marsh at the far eastern side of Mount’s Bay.

A similarly vital group of water-intensive, polluting processors are the weavers. The preparation of cloth and thread can be a time-consuming job, so it is something that quite a few people will contribute their time to on a fairly regular basis. However, the settlement has four households who are specialists. They take the raw wool and fibre bales from the farmers and wash, card, comb, and dye it as necessary before spinning it into thread and yarn, some of which is woven into cloth.

Over on this slightly smelly side of town is also the butcher. Again, they only need one household on this who take the carcasses and blood from the farmers’ slaughterhouses, and fish from the fishermen, along with things like middlings from the miller, and turn them into a variety of things. The slaughter of livestock must be carefully coordinated because fresh prime cuts of meat cannot be kept for long, even though almost all residences have a decent cold store. The butcher is one of the main people responsible for preserving this food source and produces charcuterie and other preserved meat products. They also transform the less savoury parts of the animal into food for the working dogs and domesticated cats who have jobs to do. A lot of the remaining animal byproducts go to the chandler.

The other household on the east side of the town with the water and sewage intensive operations in that of the paper miller. They have yet another windmill which drives hammers to pound recycled rags and offcuts into a paper pulp ready for pressing and drying. They also tend to make ink from things like oak galls, charcoal or bone char, dyestuffs, tree sap, honey, and egg. It isn’t a life-or-death business for the variants: they can survive without paper and ink, but it is important both to the functioning of their society and their mission. Their resident derwids maintain records concerning a range of matters from the weather and harvests to financial transactions and have authored a good many books to serve as technical manuals, provide philosophical guidance, or excite the imagination. These are often vital to the education of their offspring and for supporting the non-variants who continue to live in the horizontals their substitution activity leaves behind.

Some of the cleaned bones that are left over from the butcher’s work go along with a lot of firewood to the team’s charcoal maker, who has his base of operations to the south of Plas Hywen behind the bathhouse, along with a few other “energy intensive” industries. They don’t use turf for this: the charcoal maker has an exceptionally efficient retort muffle oven which recycles and burns the combustion gases to create superb lumpwood charcoal and bone char. Bones are also burned in an oxygenated environment to create bone ash which the potters use to make chinaware. The fly ash created by these burns is captured and used by the miners and quarrymen for use as a pozzolan in the creation of hempcrete, while the coarser wood ash goes to the chandler.

The charcoal maker is joined in this part of town by a couple of forge households who do smelting and smithing of metals, a potter, and a glassworks. Metal is obviously very important at Caer Hywen, but they don’t have huge quantities of it: they have extracted more than they need over the years and continue to do so but most of the work is about re-forging and reworking, or repairing, existing tools.

The team has obtained small quantities of gold and silver over the years. This is mainly used in decorative architectural work, with the great hall having consumed many of their “luxury” resources over the past century. However, most of the adult variants, male and female, wear some jewellery which the smiths make when they do find precious metals. This being Cornwall though, most of their work involves copper and tin with some zinc, manganese, lead, lithium, and arsenic, which they forge into bronze, brass, and pewter, or use as fluxing agents. The resulting metals go almost exclusively into the manufacture of tools, weapons, and utensils.

The furnaces get used very regularly by the households of the potter and glassmaker. They make a lot of everyday items such as crockery and containers of various kinds from either ceramics or glass. Some of these pieces are very fine indeed since the quarrying team has access to several nearby sources of kaolin, which they use to make bone china, as well as quartz and manganese, which the glassblowers use to produce crystal glass. Inevitably, these ceramic and glass wares break regularly and need replacing. Not that the broken stuff gets wasted. The broken ceramics are bound into mosaic works, used in aggregate by the builders, or ground down for use as a drainage aid in soil. Old glass is used as a pozzolan.

Also located in what might be called “the fire quarter” is the household of the chandler. This is a catch-all term for the transformation of mainly agricultural commodities and animal byproducts into a range of extremely valuable items through grinding, mixing, and heating.

Among the chandler’s products are obviously things like wax candles, which are extremely useful even though they mainly use oil lamps with seed-based lamp oil at Caer Hywen. However, their main jobs are to make soap and sugar. In the former process, they transform the plentiful wood ash into lye which can then be used in conjunction with seed oil and optional fragrances and colouring agents to produce good quality soap. They make sugar from the beets produced by the farmers and the resulting pulp byproduct goes into livestock feeds. The chandlery also makes toothpaste, with the ground shells of mussels and oysters being among the key ingredients, in conjunction with various flavouring agents, and a variety of glues, cosmetics, dyes, and powders for a range of purposes.

There is some overlap in interests and techniques between the chandler and the brewer, vintner, and distiller who also runs the tavern and general social hang out at Caer Hywen. They brew a whole range of wines, beers, and spirits from fruits and grains. In a world in which they have to make all their own entertainment, these are understandably nice to have. However, they also make ethanol (mainly from sorghum), which has vital medical and first aid applications among other uses, and distilled essential oils, mainly for use as fragrances and flavourings.

On the west side of town are a few households that are primarily dedicated to a range of useful crafts, the products of which predominantly derive from agricultural commodities and timber where the required manufacturing processes are not heavily dependent on large volumes of either water or fire.

There are about three households here who are primarily devoted to leather work. They buy the tanned hides and fish skins from the tanners and turn them into a wide range of clothing, accessories, and other useful items. The community is not so specialised that they have separate saddlers, glovers, and cobblers, so these people also make things like tack and harnesses for horses and oxen, as well as shoes and gloves; basically, anything that involves shaping, cutting, and sewing leather.

A further three households are devoted to carpentry and woodworking. Much as the leather workers must encompass all aspects of their trade, their work might involve anything from making furniture, through building work, to finishing tools made by the smith, or forming wheels and barrels. Alongside them are another three households who form the backbone of a building and construction team. Both groups have a lot to do, and they are by no means the only people who spend time either building structures or working with wood: almost everyone in the community will do so on a reasonably regular basis. However, they are the ones who specialise and devote most time to it.

It’s a similar story for the one household that is currently dedicated to the craft of producing brooms, brushes, and baskets. There is an insatiable demand for these types of items which have a limited lifespan and typically see regular, hard usage. They take things like the sorghum stalks, bits of wood, willow lathes, hog bristles, and horsehair and turn them into a host of useful items. Again, a lot of people do a bit of this kind of thing, but you can’t have farmers and other key workers spending valuable time making their own toothbrushes, brooms, and log baskets. The same goes for clothes, so Caer Hywen also has a dedicated tailor in this quarter of town.

This brings us on finally to the household of the derwid. The “druid” at Caer Hywen is not some kind of weird priest or mystic. They have a lot of practical and important jobs to do. Moreover, at this point in time, they are the only one who maintains any kind of regular contact with Cassiel.

They do not yet have any significant requirements for policing or government, but it is still the responsibility of the derwid to convene administrative assemblies and record the law as they make it. They also serve as the community treasurer and accountant with responsibility for managing the books of their “bank”, in which the issuing and receipt of currency is recorded.

The derwid are also required to serve as teachers, imparting skills in reading, writing, and maths to their non-variant offspring between the ages of 6 and 12, and to further train their long-term replacement (they are currently onto their third generation of derwid). Regular measurements must be taken of things like temperature, rainfall, sea level, wind speed, tides, and the movements of the sun, moon, and stars.

Moreover, while the adult variants are exceptionally hardy and resilient, they are not immune to illness or accident and their children (and livestock) are susceptible to disease in the normal way. Whenever medical attention or surgery is required, it is the job of the derwid to provide it, as well as to prepare the tools and medicines necessary to fulfil this role. All their accrued knowledge must also be recorded and conveyed to others as appropriate.

On top of the demands of running a general practice, they had to function as biologists, chemists, physicists, and engineers. If there were to be any innovative new machines or devices introduced, or unusual architectural requirements to satisfy, it was the job of the derwid to produce the necessary designs and direct the work.

Last, and by no means least, the derwid are required to be performers. With their unsubstituted offspring present and non-variant adults in the abandoned horizontals, it is the derwid’s job to retell the myths and orchestrate the seasonal ceremonies that punctuate the year at Caer Hywen.

Being a derwid was a demanding job. The word basically meant “oak tree” in their language and the idea was very much along the lines that the derwid took nutrients from the putative roots of their culture and passing phenomena of the sky and nature to form a strong, binding structure for the community as a whole.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to do it alone. Aside from the fact that all the variants had a huge range of skills and knowledge, even if they weren’t currently all using them, a “household” in all the above only very rarely means a single nuclear family. While there would be a place of work that doubled up as a dwelling in most cases, it wasn’t necessarily the case that the partner of a derwid was also a derwid, or that that of a carpenter was also a carpenter. Not everyone was coupled up all the time, those that were often worked in places other than where their partner did, and jobs changed hands from family to family between generations. By “household” I mean a structure or collection of structures in which at least two more or less full-time workers are engaged in a particular activity, usually with one to two apprentices between the ages of 12 and 18 and/or a “light” or occasional worker, such as an elderly individual.

This brings us to the final place we need to visit at Caer Hywen: the nominal “place of work” for the druids or derwid, whatever we want to call them. Since its completion, schooling of the young has mostly begun to be undertaken in the great hall when either the topic or the weather conditions demand it be done indoors. However, the great hall is not the only impressive “public” work which the variants have built over the past century. Over on the mount is the base of operations for the derwid at Caer Hywen.

You proceed down the hill past the fishing households, out of town by the south gate, and through the marshy alder and willow carr that grows on the isthmus. Where the ground begins to broaden and rise, the swamp mists and trees start to clear after you pass through a kind of living archway, and you will see that they have turned the tip of the isthmus into a kind of woodland park and rockery garden. Plant species that can handle the acidic soils and saline conditions of the promontory cover the craggy exposed rocks. Four good sized clearings have been made in the woods that are sewn with grasses and wildflowers. It is in these places that they hold their seasonal ceremonies and, if you look from the air, you would see that they are arranged in a semi-circle at regular intervals in front of the mount.

Paths lead between and through these clearings up to the top of the mount where there is a collection of stone-built structures set within a fairly substantial wall. Right at the top, above everything else on the southern side of the crest, is a circular space in which the stone pavement is inscribed with a series of elliptic lines and glyphs inlaid with bronze that indicate the hours of the day and days of the year. In front of these lines on the southern side of the ring is a large slate gnomon; behind them at the northern zenith is a pedestal on which is set a large, ornate bronze armillary sundial constructed of rings within rings.

Just beyond these open-air sundials, set on the northern edge of the plaza, is a windowless, drum-like, stone building standing about 40 feet tall and 20 feet in diameter with a single door at the foot of the building on the south side. Although difficult to make out in the darkness of the interior, the white plastered walls are also inscribed with elliptic lines, but inlaid this time in gold and silver. Although it is almost impossible to discern from the ground, the south face of the tower has a kind of dish-like depression in the stonework at the centre of which is set a pinhole gnomon and a series of quartz prisms that project an image of the sun surrounded by rainbows into the dimly lit interior that pinpoints the time and date on the north wall. If you turn around, you will see that camera obscura techniques are also used in the north face of the tower to project a panoramic image of Caer Hywen around the south side of the interior.

Arrayed around the rest of the plaza to the northeast and northwest, in a manner that is largely dictated by the demands of the rugged site, are a couple of rather more conventional rectilinear structures. One of these is a large two-storey structure in which the ground floor has slatted windows, a bit like Venetian blinds, to block out direct sunlight. The upper storey is a timber framed affair that offers considerably more generous lighting conditions. This building serves as a kind of records office and library for the collection of works on paper that the team have written over the past century. The other building is rather more barn-like and provides a simple covered space for use by the derwid as a kind of lab or workshop. It also sees regular service as a second classroom.

As you can no doubt tell, the variants have been keeping themselves busy. However, they have by no means been overworking themselves. Once weekends and festivals are accounted for, they only really work for two thirds of the year at most. Moreover, they don’t aim to produce much more than they need, so it is often unnecessary to do anything in particular and time can be devoted to labours of love. Additionally, there are some days when the winds are pounding in from the southwest and the rain is hammering against the shutters when the only thing many of them can do is batten down the hatches and hunker up in the tavern. By modern standards, productivity is really very low at Caer Hywen. Even where they do spend long hours on particular aspects of their work, it is not alienated labour and there are many aspects of it which they find satisfying.

There have been some tough times when the natural world had thrown up challenges that, even with advance warning, were not easy to deal with. In some horizontals, they had experienced sequential years of multiple crop failure, or times when previously unknown diseases and viral strains had afflicted people or livestock, sometimes almost wiping them out in the process. However, by the time it came to deal with these problems on the diagonal, the crew had usually managed to find solutions, even if it had occasionally required Cassiel’s analytical abilities to do so.

Most of the time though, the climate was good, food was abundant, and they had plenty of spare time on their hands to enjoy themselves. It was sometimes a relief not to have non-variant shit to deal with, beyond the usual trials of children. You could just gather at the pub between your first and second sleep to gaze up at the thick blanket of stars in the clear summer night sky and think about all that had happened over the years. On the other hand, they missed non-variants. It was less fun playing the game on your own.

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