The prehistoric glaciation had gifted Brythan with gentle rolling hills that consisted largely of alluvial soil with a lot of sand and clay which combined to produce numerous streams and springs feeding into rivers and lakes making fresh clean water abundant.
As the retreating glaciation had shaped the land into its abundant contours it had also deposited the occasional boulder one of which was more or less an entire mountain top sheered off by the weight and pressure of the ice.
This massif formed the foundation for the Citadel, a stony enclave which was Brythans only city that controlled most of the trade and stood guard over the wharves and warehouses, quays and piers which protected the shipping of their prosperous traders.
The Citadel was a law unto itself, quite separate from how the rest of Brythan was, being largely rural scattered with a few small towns and many little villages.
Brythan had neither the resources nor the inclination to maintain a standing army or a civil force to enforce non existent rules and regulations being a laissez faire sort of environment in which the various communities relied upon common sense and local concensus about what was acceptable behaviour.
The channel that separated Brythan from the continent though only 20 miles wide at its narrowest point, was a seething maelstrom of strong currents, rip tides, hidden reefs and sandbars and fierce and unpredictable storms.
Invasion fleets were not a problem especially since the two or three past attempts had ended in disaster for the would be conquerors. What was there to conquer anyway?
However Brythans own merchant marine was quietly successful at maintaining trading links even if it meant taking the long way round to avoid the channel when it was in turmoil but there were numerous opportunities for entrepreneurs to benefit from challenging these various trading obstacles and one such family was the Hiltons who had found a way around the Citadel's virtual monopoly.
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