Descriptive Setting

Angel's Writing

Descriptive Setting

This is a descriptive setting of what I feel the 12th century would look like. This was originally an assignment my writing mentor made me do from an old workshop that she had done ten years prior. I hated doing every moment of it but to tell you the truth, I learned a lot about my characters and my writing style.

This novel takes place in medieval times around 1100AD. The countryside is open and filled with green fields for grazing of cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs or they were for planting the harvest of wheat, rye, oats and barley. The orchards that grew near the villages were plentiful with fruit of apples, pears, plums, cherries, and sloe. The land that wasn’t used for the villages or fields and grazing was grown over with long, tall sweeping grass that swayed gently in the light breezes that graced the warm land.

The rivers and streams weaved and wound around the countryside shimmering and shining in the sunlight brimming over with fish. There were eels, pike, minnows, turbot, trout, and lampreys. The birds swam and played in the water, nesting along the edges. Graceful swans could be seen gliding across the water with their young trailing closely behind. The heron and cranes would fly elegantly over the smooth water landing on their slim legs to walk through the long cattails and water lilies. The streams and rivers also supported playful otters darting in and out of the water and disappearing under the gentle current; beautifully and artistically made dames that could only be made by the wary beavers doting the rivers edges making smooth lakes.

The forests may have been dark but they held beautiful creatures such as red deer, roe deer, and majestic stags of great proportion. The mysterious wolves hid in the shadows always watching and sly foxes sending farmers into a fit of rage after a few chickens go missing even after they think that they have finally beaten the fox. The birds play in the branched of the hazel, ash, beech and oak flying from tree to tree as the social creatures that they are. They dodge the squirrels and chipmunks running through the trees chasing each other and fighting over acorns. The watch from above the bears raiding the honey bees hives and the wild boars running around on short little legs searching for forage and running from the wolves.

Villages are scattered across the countryside like little mushrooms sprouting from nowhere. The villages vary in sizes from very small to almost full-blown out towns but there were very few that amounted to those sizes. The houses were small, usually one room either sunken floor or framed. The more common house in a smaller village surrounded by fields would have been a simple sunken because of lack of wood for a sturdier framed house that would have been erected near the forest.

There were fortresses near some of the larger villages but very few of them. They were large in size having the capacity to hold anywhere from fifty people to a hundred.