Drúadan Forest

West of Minas Tirith, where the White Mountains threw out the outlying hills on which Gondor's first beacons, Amon Dîn and Eilenach, were kept, a dark wood of pine and fir covered the slopes: the Drúadan Forest, or the Grey Wood in the Anduin-valley tongue. The Great West Road skirted it on the north, and the Men of Gondor and Rohan avoided it, telling tales of the Wild Men who lived there and shot poisoned arrows at intruders. These were the Drúedain, the Woses, a short, broad, deep-voiced people with an ancient skill in tracking and in stone-carving, who had lived in the White Mountains before the Númenóreans came and had made the Púkel-men on the road to Dunharrow. The Rohirrim had hunted them like animals in earlier days, and they held a grudge.

Through the forest ran the Stonewain Valley, a hidden trench in the hills along which, long ago, the Men of Gondor had built a road for carrying stone from the quarries of Anórien to the capital. By the end of the Third Age it was forgotten by everyone but the Woses.

The Drúedain had dwindled to a remnant in the forest by the time of the Stewards, ignored by Gondor. In the War of the Ring their knowledge became decisive. On March 13 to 14, 3019, the Rohirrim under Théoden, riding east to relieve the siege, learned that Sauron's northern force from Cair Andros had blocked the Great West Road in Anórien. The headman Ghân-buri-Ghân came to the King's camp in the forest and offered to guide the host by the Stonewain Valley around the enemy, asking only that the Wild Men be left in peace afterwards. He led the Riders through the hills to the grey light of the Pelennor's northern wall and departed, and the Rohirrim charged the besiegers at dawn on March 15. The Woses also harried the retreating Orcs in the days after the battle.

After the war, on his way north with Théoden's funeral procession, King Elessar declared the forest the possession of Ghân-buri-Ghân's people forever, forbidding any man to enter it without their leave, and the drums of the Woses were heard from the wood as the riders passed.

The forest lay in Anórien north-west of Minas Tirith, on the northern slopes of the mountains between the beacons of Amon Dîn and Eilenach, close to the Great West Road and the road to Rohan. The Stonewain Valley ran through it eastward to emerge near the Rammas Echor.