"They heard of the Great Barrows, and the green mounds, and the stone-rings upon the hills and in the hollows among the hills. Sheep were bleating in flocks. Green walls and white walls rose. There were fortresses on the heights. Kings of little kingdoms fought together, and the young Sun shone like fire on the red metal of their new and greedy swords. There was victory and defeat; and towers fell, fortresses were burned, and flames went up into the sky. Gold was piled on the biers of dead kings and queens; and mounds covered them, and the stone doors were shut; and the grass grew over all. Sheep walked for a while biting the grass, but soon the hills were empty again. A shadow came out of dark places far away, and the bones were stirred in the mounds. Barrow-wights walked in the hollow places with a clink of rings on cold fingers, and gold chains in the wind. Stone rings grinned out of the ground like broken teeth in the moonlight."

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This is ArdaCraft's recreation of the Barrow-downs, the cursed hills on the borders of the Shire from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Once an area of burial mounds (and a last place of refuge for the Dúnedain of Cardolan), the downs were cursed by the Witch-king over a thousand years before the events of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and were haunted by barrow-wights as a result.

The Barrow-downs (known as the Tyrn Gorthad in Sindarin) are an area of chalk downland, and as such they conform to geological and botanical realism, with a dip-and-scarp topography, trellis drainage pattern and appropriate vegetation (i.e. heather, tussock grass, lavender, etc). They also conform to the exact specifications of the lore, found mainly in Chapter 8 of the Fellowship of the Ring ("Fog on the Barrow-downs") - down to the exact placement of ancient stone pillars and shape and size of the barrows themselves.

The Barrow-downs form part of a larger project which seeks to recreate Middle-earth in its entirety.

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The Barrow-downs can be viewed from above on ArdaCraft's dynmap. There is no download avaliable, but ArdaCraft is a non-whitelisted server which anyone is welcome to come and explore, provided they have installed our modpack first.

All information can be found in our website at http://ardacraft.me/.