A wide summer hay meadow, half-mown into golden windrows, dew glittering in low light.

Location

Longmead

The great half-mown hay meadow beside Tedderley in the cozy-fantasy land of Wending, where a wandering inn once set down her doorstep a dozen paces from the cut grass.

  • Region: Haymaking country, beside Tedderley

The Meadow Cut for a Feast

Longmead is a meadow with a job to do, and midsummer is when it does it.

By the longest day it lies half-mown, the cut rows drawn out in long golden windrows that glitter with dew, the uncut half still rippling when the breeze walks through the seed-heads. The hay comes in, and when it is in, the village sits down to supper on the green at the meadow’s edge. That is the shape of Longmead’s year: work, and then a table.

It is the kind of open, easy country a wandering inn favours when she has a mind to help. Level ground, a short walk to the village, grass already cut where a path would be wanted. She will set her front step a dozen paces from the meadow’s edge and wait, quiet and unassuming, to be seen when someone is ready to see her.

Come the sun-down toast of the longest evening, there is nowhere in Wending softer than Longmead in the gold, with the linden loud with bees and the whole hay-scent of the year hanging warm in the

Elsewhere In Wending

Related Corners Of The Realm

  • cozy fantasy
  • meadow
  • wending
  • summer
  • the gadding goose