Tallow Bends

A wee little hamlet of some fifty heads along the Wychwood Way on the edge of the forest of the same name, Tallow Bends has built up around the point where the Whispervale Trail joins the Wychwood.

For much of the Wychwood Way, it runs along the River Tallow, including past the abandoned location of the original town of Tallow’s Landing. Twenty years ago, most of Tallow’s Landing slid into the Tallow in a massive mudslide – creating the Tallow’s Ford. Tallow Bends is where the last population of the town moved after the disaster.

The Wychwood Way is paved with cobbled stone in the busier stretchs (but no longer in this area, as the cobbled portion slid into the river) and links Eastmarch to Westhaven. Merchants, pilgrims, and occasional soldiers travel the Way – but few pause here as there is little in the way of hospitality besides a very small inn on the north side of town.

The Emberlight Inn is the house along the Whispervale on the north side of town (the centre road that leads off the north side of the map). Once a small farm, it has slowly become an inn with a small common room and three rooms upstairs for guests to rent. The innkeeper (Tobin “Sootfist” Marris) was the blacksmith back in Tallow’s landing, but could not afford to rebuild after his smithy, anvil, and tools were swept away into the river.

The small farm on the south side of town tucked into the trees without any fields is both the shrine to the local river deity (Leatha), and home to ‘brother Corbin’, the quiet druid acolyte of the shrine.

Once per season (near the solstices and equinoxes), the villagers gather in the orchard at the full moon and offer tallow candles to Leatha for bountiful harvests in the “Moon Murmur Festival”.

However, during the latest Moon-Murmur, half the candles burned out on their own – Leatha’s anger, or a saboteur’s trick?

But on the topic of the candles of the Moon-Murmur festival; hunters and travellers sometimes disappear in the Wychwood, and a few have sworn that they followed drifting candle-lights deep into the trees.

https://dysonlogos.blog/2025/06/27/tallow-bends/