Dougan's Hole
ougan's Hole was the smallest of the ten towns, and visitors who make the trek from Bryn Shander are likely to be underwhelmed when they finally reach the small cluster of dwellings perched on the edge of Redwaters. Even Good Mead, barely more populous, seems more civilized with its decorated mead hall and its cultivation of the surrounding forest. The only improvements that the people of Dougan’s Hole have made to their bit of shoreline are the two piers they built for launching their boats and the gravel they put down between their dwellings to keep paths and roads from becoming a sodden mess.
The residents depend for trade entirely on the knucklehead trout they fish from Redwaters, since the town is not large enough to support any industry—not even scrimshaw. The able scrimshanders of Ten-Towns reside in the larger communities of the two northern lakes, so merchants from Dougan’s Hole sell raw ivory and salted fish at Bryn Shander’s market, hoping to make enough coin to buy grain for the winter in addition to hooks and line for the next fishing season.
In winter, Dougan’s Hole becomes even more isolated from the other towns, and the road connecting it to Good Mead and the Eastway is frequently blocked by deep drifts of snow. Even when the road is passable, the residents keep to their own, including the speaker, Edgra Durmoot. Although the traditional midwinter council meeting in Bryn Shander is always spottily attended, Edgra is alone among the speakers of Ten-Towns in never having attended a single one. She prefers to be with her people, she says, who are too busy hunting, trapping, and chopping wood for their fires—simply trying to survive the winter—to worry about politics.
History
The hamlet of Dougan's Hole was founded by Dougan Dubrace, when he found a great spot to fish on the shore of Redwaters lake.
During the 1360s DR, the spokesman was Freya Grynstead, the widow of the previous spokesman who had died while fishing out on the lake. Freya lived in a house in the middle of town connected to the fishhouse by a boardwalk.
Some one hundred years later, around the Year of the Iron Dwarf's Vengeance, 1485 DR, the speaker was the outspoken and gruff trapper Edgra Durmoot.
Twenty Stones of Thruun
About the only interesting feature in Dougan’s Hole, and the only reason most travelers bother visiting the place, is the strange megaliths known as the Twenty Stones of Thruun. Standing at the town’s southern edge, these rudely fashioned granite menhirs are arranged in a perfect triangle, with a single stone anchoring the formation’s center. No one knows who built the structure or why; the townsfolk maintain that the stones were there when the town’s founder, Dougan Dubrace, first happened upon his famous fishing spot. Many northern scholars have tried to research the origin of the structure’s name, but all they found were allusions to a creature named Thruun in the oldest legends of the northern folk. Some speculate that Thruun was a god who disappeared from the pantheon of Faerûn long ago, but others question whether such a being ever existed.
“They’re an odd lot, the folks o’ Dougan’s Hole. Keep to ’emselves, and seem to like it that way. I only visited there once. After the first day, I got the sense they thought it best for me to leave. After the third day, I got the sense they were right.”
Knucklehead Trout Scrimshaw
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