The Old Forest Road

The Dwarf-road

The road was laid out by the Dwarves in the Elder Days as the eastern stretch of the great highway that joined the Blue Mountains, Khazad-dûm and the Iron Hills. West of the forest it was the same road as the Great East Road, crossing the Misty Mountains by the High Pass and the Anduin at the Old Ford below the Carrock. From the ford it entered Mirkwood and ran east in an almost straight line, passing south of the Mountains of Mirkwood and coming out on the eastern side of the forest above the East Bight, where in the days of the Northmen a settled country lay between the wood and the river Celduin.

When the Shadow fell on the forest the road decayed. By T.A. 2941 Beorn could tell Thorin's company that it was choked with undergrowth, that its eastern end had sunk into impassable bogs, and that orcs and worse things used it, so that the safer path was the Elf-road farther north from the Forest Gate to the Elvenking's halls. Unfinished Tales records that Isildur in T.A. 2 was making for this road and the Old Ford when he was ambushed above the Gladden Fields, and that the road as a whole was reckoned the work of Durin's folk. In the Fourth Age, with Mirkwood cleansed and renamed Eryn Lasgalen, the road across the middle of the forest lay in the land granted to the Beornings and Woodmen, and was presumably reopened for traffic between the Anduin vale and Dale.

Crosses Mirkwood from west to east, from the Old Ford of Anduin to the plains east of the forest above the East Bight, passing south of the Mountains of Mirkwood.