The Ashway

The Ashway began as a pilgrim road, when people still walked north to leave offerings at the foot of the Wall. The offerings stopped two centuries ago. The road stayed, paved in the south, gravel through the midlands, and barely a path in the last hundred miles. Every forty miles there is a waystation, most of them abandoned, some of them very much not. The road is called the Ashway because the stones are gray volcanic ash-rock, and because, the old joke goes, that's what's left of the people who took it all the way.