Great Smials

The name of the great underground dwelling dug at Tookbank by Isengrim II in the late 27th century of the Third Age. The old fortified smial dug by Isumbras I a thousand years earlier had been of little use to the Tooks after the last Men were run out of the Shire. It had stood half-abandoned for centuries when Isengrim decided to appropriate its ridge-top location for the grandest estate house in the Shire. The workers on the project stumbled or excavated many remnants of the old fortifications as the work progressed. One of the less discussed events of the digging was the discovery of an ancient mass grave, one filled with skeletons twice the size of a Hobbit. The story was given out that these were victims of the Great Plague, buried here by Hobbits after the epidemic's passing. In truth, and only Gandalf suspected it, was that the filled sinkhole Isengrim turned into a duck pond was used for executions of bandits, trespassers, and spies during the first decades of the Shire grant. Isumbras the Long and his followers wished no quarrel with royal officials, so many of these unfortunates were weighed down with their belongings and dumped in the pond in which they were drowned. Although the bodies were later reburied, many valuable mathoms from the 17th century were quietly locked away in a chest in Great Smials.