The Carrock

The rock in the river

The Carrock rises from the waters of Anduin a little way upstream of the Old Ford, where the Great East Road comes down from the High Pass and crosses the river toward Mirkwood. It is a steep, grey mass of stone, more hill than boulder, with a flat top and one side that drops sheer to the current. The river swirls round it and spreads into a shallow crossing on its eastern side, the Ford of Carrock, which was the usual passage for those coming from the pass toward the Beornings' country. Downstream the vale opens into grassland and oak-wood, the land of Beorn; upstream the river runs up toward the sources beneath the Grey Mountains.

Beorn called it the Carrock simply because it was the rock, and no other name is recorded. He cut a stair of steps up its landward face to a broad, level summit, where he liked to sit at night and watch the moon over the mountains, and the marks of his feet and paws were plain on the steps and on the ledges by the water. From the top a traveller could see the whole line of the Misty Mountains to the west and the dark edge of Mirkwood a day's journey to the east.

The Carrock enters the tale in the summer of T.A. 2941, when the Eagles of the mountains, having plucked Gandalf, Bilbo and Thorin's company from the burning trees where the goblins and wargs had trapped them, carried them east over the river and set them down on its summit. From there the company waded the ford and walked to Beorn's hall. The following spring Bilbo and Gandalf, returning from Erebor with Beorn, passed the rock again on their way to the High Pass.

In the years after the Battle of Five Armies the Beornings grew into a numerous people between the mountains and the forest, and the Ford of Carrock became one of the two crossings they guarded. Glóin told the Council of Elrond that under Grimbeorn the Beornings kept both the ford and the pass open, though at a price in tolls, and that neither wolf nor orc dared their land. The Carrock and its ford remained the gateway between Rivendell and the Woodland Realm into the Fourth Age.

A rock-island in the upper Anduin north of the Old Ford, east of the High Pass and west of the western eaves of Mirkwood, with a ford on its eastern side.