City Plan: Low Merrin#

Kethra Almanac • City plans • Approved 19 September 2026 • drafted 19 September 2026

Status: approved. Briana approved the city plans on 19 September 2026 (City Plans and Map Styles Approval). Where this page calls something a proposal, read it as approved. The points under What the plan does not settle are being settled on her instruction of the same day.

Status before approval: This street plan is new material, so it waits for Briana's approval (Almanac Approval Decision). That covers every street, its name, and every district and building not marked canon below. What it takes from the approved almanac is cited to file and line (for example 33:46 is the Free Oreth Coast States almanac, Part 2, line 46), and nothing here overrides canon. The canon does not say whether Low Merrin is on the coast; the Atlas puts it 162 km inland. This plan sets it in one of Merrin's fertile valleys.

Using the plan. Drag to move, and zoom with the mouse wheel, the + and − buttons, or a pinch. Names come in as you zoom, each set lettered to read at the same size on screen:

• Whole town: the valley, the districts and the villages.
• About 2½ times: main streets and the great buildings.
• About 6 times: the longer streets and the smaller places.
• About 12 times: the name of nearly every street.

The ⤢ button fills the screen. North is up, and the scale bar bottom left is always true.

The town at a glance#

The districts#

The town lies on both banks of the valley's river. Vines climb the sunny slopes to the north, and orchards the slopes to the south (proposal). The river is not named in the canon, and the plan does not name it.

Getting around#

• The Stellan road (canon name). Fennick is a "Southern canton town on the Stellan road" (34:26). On the plan the road leaves the town south-west, by Fennick, for Stellan.
• The High Merrin road (proposal) runs up the valley to High Merrin.
• The Tessmere road (proposal) runs north-east toward Tessmere and the northern coast.
• The Shore Line (canon), "the one railway" of the coast (33:164). The canon runs it "from Northgate to Aldport along the coast" and does not name Low Merrin as a stop. The plan brings it through the town, as the proposal roads map does, with Low Merrin Station in the New Quarter.
• Air. The canon names only "Tessmere and Stellan airports" (33:166). Low Merrin has none.

Landmarks#

Canon places are marked canon. Their position on the plan is a proposal unless the text gives it.

How the streets are named (proposal)#

These rules, as Briana set out on 19 September 2026, hold for every city plan:

• streets are often numbered;
• famous people, leaders above all, get streets, and those streets sit together;
• an estate takes a theme, such as flowers;
• many streets keep the name of whoever first laid the road;
• some streets simply stop at a field whose owner never sold, and the suburbs have their cul-de-sacs.

In Low Merrin the rules take this form:

• The cantons' streets meet at the Diet. Merrin's leaders are its cantons. The Presidership passes round them "in the order they joined the Confederacy" (32:223), and the Diet is "Where the thirteen cantons meet" (34:48). The streets that meet at the Diet are named for the other twelve cantons: the town's own canton needs no street of its own.
• The New Quarter is numbered, First Street to Thirteenth Street.
• Each district names its streets for its work: the river and its mills, the vineyard, the orchard.
• The valley's old lanes keep their founders' names. They are the coast's own family names: Dunstan's Lane, Doral's Lane, Ruel's Lane.
• The old villages keep their own streets: Press Street, Cider Lane, Chapel Lane, Ford End.
• Estates were built on the fields that sold, each with a theme:
  • flowers (Marigold Road, Daisy Road);
  • trees (Walnut Drive);
  • the orchard (Grafter Road);
  • birds (Heron Close, Swift Close);
  • herbs (Marjoram Way);
  • stones (Jasper Drive).
• Fields and orchards whose owners never sold are still worked, with the estates round them.
• Every street longer than 80 m has a name: 7,806 of 8,046.
  • A name is used once in the town.
  • The estates may repeat a name found far off, never within 6 km or in the same locality.
• No towers. Low Merrin does not build upward; its growth has gone into the valley.

The names avoid everything the naming rules and the canon forbid:

• Nothing is taken from Earth's places or history (05:266).
• Reedcombe and Saltcombe are canon cantons, so their streets keep their names. No other new name uses the crowded families: "-gate", "-mere", "-combe", "Salt-", "Grey-" and "Hollow-".

What the plan does not settle#

These are open for Briana; the plan follows the text in each case:

• Coast or inland. Merrin has "a warm coast" (32:122) and an Oldharbour canton, but the canon never says whether Low Merrin itself is on the coast. Checked as part of the 19 September 2026 harbour repair and left as the plan has it: nothing in the text calls Low Merrin a port, so its marker did not move, and it stays the 171 km inland the corrected Atlas now shows (up slightly from 162 km, because the coast it's measured against shifted elsewhere in the repair). Whether the town itself should be coastal is still Briana's to decide.
• Where the Presider sits. The AL 2314 Presider, Anneke Doral, heads Fennick canton (33:47). The Diet at Low Merrin is where "its Presider changes every year" (34:48), but the canon does not say where the Presider works. Settled: the plan's own Diet Quarter (see Guidance for AI actors below) is where the Presider sits while in office, alongside the Diet itself.
• The Refuge Law's register. The "common register" is a Council power (33:74), but Tessmere's Refuge Office "Registers runaways as free" (33:257). Settled: read as two tiers — the Council sets the common register's policy for all three states, and each state's own office, Tessmere's included, keeps its own local entries within it.

Guidance for AI actors#

• "Call people by their names. No honorifics, no ranks." (33:219)
• Canton Day, 1 Firstred, is when "Merrin's new Presider takes the staff" (33:188). Three Shores Day is 9 Greening (33:185).
• A Merrin gives an address by district: "the Diet Quarter, Fennick Lane"; "the Vine Terraces, Cellar Lane".
• What is canon, and what is only the plan: the valley farming, the Diet, the Three Shores Council, the Shore Court and the School are canon. The valley's shape, the districts, the streets and their names, the railway's route and the exact positions are the plan's proposals.

Sources#

The almanac, approved 19 September 2026:

• the Free Oreth Coast States (32–33) and their Register (34);
• the Atlas's places at Low Merrin.

The plan is built by _build/make_cityplans.js from _build/city_specs/lowmerrin.js, which lists every canon line it keeps.