Why some marks are large
A mark is one place, not one story, and it grows with how many stand there. Where a book says only “at Navan”, the gazetteer can offer nothing finer than the town, so every Navan story lands on the same point. A large rust circle is not a busy street. It is a whole town’s worth of stories with nowhere more exact to go, and it is work we still have to do.
What the colours promise
Green means the record placed a story at a spot: a building, a monument, a grave. Brown means a townland, small enough to point at and honest about the rest. Rust means a whole place, where the point is the middle of somewhere rather than the thing itself. The companion speaks to the same rule on the road, and will not say “right here” about a story it can only place to a parish.
A story’s place is the gazetteer’s best reading of the text and can be wrong. Tell us if you spot one that is. The books these were read from are listed here.