Utterby

Ironwood is the nickname Rhovanion gives a species of Hornbeam used for a variety of woodcrafting purposes. The dried heartwood is a pure unchallenged white hue and is used for artistic inlay and work. The general wood is difficult to fell, plane, or shape, but the effort is rewarded by producing the highest quality handles and poles for long-lasting tools and spears that the men of Wilderland use to build and protect their homes from the elements, Orc, and Warg alike. 

And thus, Utterby existed long before it had a proper name. Its first nameless incarnation was simply as a lumber camp conveniently built next to the trade road and river where whole hemmed trees left via the trade road to points beyond, or were taken to be guided up-river towards Long Lake and Laketown by trade skiffs and oxen teams. A rudimentary fence was built around the settlement as a means of defense, and the sole inhabitants were the outcrop of hearty woodsman who felled the local copse of valuable hornbeams from the eves of Mirkwood Forest. 

Merchants came to haggle for prices and to choose the best samples, and the Ironwood Inn was built to house them and entertain them during their stays, and as the wealth of the lumber camp grew - it earned a name - Utterby, a nickname more than a proper moniker, it simply means "The Outer Village" in the local line of Dalish. Once the Ironwood Inn was built, and mercantile interest in the lumber output grew - a self-made exporter and importer from Laketown - Gararic Omdahl saw further potential in Utterby's small but important export. Not just the pittance made on unfinished logs for which another village up river gleaned the profits for debarking and planning, but a fully functional village - complete with its own river-driven lumber mill, a rare and liberal intention, given that hand-sawing remained the common practice because of the expense to build, maintain, and staff such a venture. 

But after a solid night of mead, a round of well-told bravado-filled stories, and promises on the graves of ancestors, a charter was signed between the lumber camp's workers and Gararic. In exchange for agreeing to make Gararic the Overseer of Utterby's lumber production with an assigned portion of the operations profits, Gararic would put forward the capital to transform Utterby into a proper outpost - he would build a lumber mill and support the call to arms for a dedicated force of well-paid Guards to ensure that the expensive adventure wasn't laid to waste by an incursion of orcs from the nearby mountains. 

And so Utterby grew. And as the profits rose and the Guard was drafted, wives were found, and children followed, and in time Utterby became a very small, but functional village centered around a trio of buildings - the old Ironwood Inn, the oldest proper building the settlement, followed by Gararic's dream - the Lumber Mill, which overtime came to be called the Lumber Lodge as it served both as the workspace and the housing for the men employed there, while their wives helped to maintain a small grazing yard and garden plots to supplement the village's needs for food otherwise provided by the scattering of hunters and fishermen amongst the citizenry. 

In time, a hunter on the prowl for a wild boar on the eaves of Mirkwood made a curious discovery at the root of an older, twisted hornbeam - a knotty black tuber which his quarry was rooting for with a reckless abandon. Slaying his prize, he stooped to examine the curious growth and returned with it to Utterby's small market and sold it for enough to buy his evening's beer thinking it to be some wild thing of little value. An errand boy coming from the Ironwood Inn to fetch more supplies came across it and bought it as a curiosity having heard the story of its finding. 

He wondered if perhaps it was a wild food that the trencherman might make something out of it, wind the story of its finding, and charge some inflated price to any merchants staying in the Inn brave enough to try it. And a merchant did try it, and rather, as the errand boy expected, he didn't feel cheated and abused for over paying for a meal made with some half-rotten wild potato, he was ecstatic - his dish was a delight, hinted with a taste of something he'd never had before. And word of the mystery food spread. 

Experimentation with the growths, difficult and rare to find revealed that sausages and cheese were the best uses of the curious flavor. And Utterby discovered another source of export out of its small dock - something that rumor has even the Elvenking's Halls seek, as much as the Wood Elves like to dine on fine wine, and curious foodstuffs to go with it. 

What Utterby will do with this potential source of wealth and whether the increase in merchant traffic to town will just encourage more action by the local orc horde remains to be seen.

Utterby exports much by way of wood from the Mirkwood to the rest of Rhovanion, especially Laketown and deals in such export through the Lumber Lodge.