A small summer village beside a half-mown hay meadow, cottages and a great flowering tree on the green.

Location

Tedderley

A little haymaking village near Longmead in the cozy-fantasy land of Wending, where the whole parish sits down to one long supper table on the longest day of the year.

  • Region: Haymaking country, near Longmead

The Village at the Edge of the Hay

Tedderley is haymaking country: cut grass, hot clover, and a rooster that never wins its arguments with the dog.

It is a small place where the year is measured in feast-days and everyone has always sat where they have always sat. Cottages face each other across a lane narrow enough for gossip. A cart takes a quarter-hour to reach the crossroads, and nobody thinks that slow. When there is a supper to lay, the whole parish is in it: the baker with her barley loaves, the fiddler who tunes twice, the children with blossom caught in their sleeves.

Like most of Wending, Tedderley keeps its old ways without always remembering what they were for. Most years that causes no trouble at all. It is exactly the sort of green a wandering inn might settle beside for a few ordinary mornings, once an extraordinary one has passed. Come the next day, someone always wonders why the lane ever looked right without a public house at the end of it.

Elsewhere In Wending

Related Corners Of The Realm

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