The Cold Ford Stones

A cairn-line marking the safe shallows beside the Karth Bridge timber span — read them right and you cross; read them wrong and the river takes you.

The stones are old and local knowledge; the topmost ones rim with ice by late autumn and have to be re-read by touch when the mist comes off the gorge. The tribal track leaves the road just upstream of them, where the bank gives a foothold the stones do not mark. First-time crossers who go by sight rather than sequence rarely make the far bank in winter.