CHAPTER FOUR
“Barleyfields is a farming community, but after a fashion that would surprise valley dwellers. The farmers’ homes and storehouses are all clustered together in town, but their terraced fields are on the slopes above and below the town proper.
The town is friendly to tourists, with handsomely decorated stone houses, picturesque views, and a lively business in barley-derived beer, but the difficulty in working one’s own fields without trespassing on anyone else’s tends to lead to internal feuds and sometimes external ones.
The hostility toward The Town supposedly started with goatherds failing to keep their animals out of the Barleyfields crops. Barleyfields has legal but sporadic access to electricity, often interrupted by avalanches, but only a primitive septic system.”
(E
