Places in Middle-earth
Bree
Type: Cities, Towns, Settlements
Region: Bree/The Shire
Location: In Eriador, in between the Barrow-downs and the Midgewater Marshes. The village is at the meeting of the Great East Road and the old North Road; after the fall of Arnor this road was little used and came to be called the Greenway by the time of the Ring War.
Description: Bree was the chief village of the Bree-land, a small inhabited region, like an island in the empty lands round about. Lying round
Bree-hill and the villages was a small country of fields and tamed woodland only a few miles broad...
The village of Bree had some hundred stone houses of the Big Folk, mostly above the Road, nestling on the hillside with windows looking west. On that side, running in more than half a circle from the hill and back to it, there was a deep dike with a thick hedge on the inner side. Over this the Road crossed by a causeway; but where it pierced the hedge it was barred by a great gate. There was another gate in the southern comer where the Road ran out of the village. The gates were closed at nightfall; but just inside them were small lodges for the gatekeepers.
Down on the Road, where it swept to the right to go round the foot of the hill, there was a large inn. It had been built long ago when the traffic on the roads had been far greater. For Bree stood at an old meeting of ways; another ancient road crossed the East Road just outside the dike at the western end of the village, and in former days Men and other folk of various sorts had travelled much on it. But the Northern Lands had long been desolate, and the North Road was now seldom used: it was grass-grown, and the Bree-folk called it the Greenway.
FotR, Book I, Ch 9, At the Sign of The Prancing Pony
Contributors: Lyllyn 5.29.03