A lovely little home in the Shire

**A lovely little home in the Shire**

There is always good gossip to be found in any halfling community – stories are told around meals and often grow with each telling. Tales of grand adventures and even grander traeasures collected and hidden away. Among the local halflings, one particular home is the centre of these rumours and gossip – the home of old Bill Burrowes. Everyone knows that Bill has more money than his family did before him – tales spread of dragon’s gold, bewitched coin purses, and a massive underground hoard that Bill discovered under his own home, built by ancestors unknown.

The Burrowes Burrow is a lovely home with a guest suite and multiple places to eat, as befits any well-off halfling. The front doors are almost unseemingly large for a halfling home, grand double doors that open into an airy hall. To the immediate left is Bill’s study and library, where he conducts his business, which seems to mostly involve writing long letters to people both local and distant. Beyond that is the guest suite with two beds and its own water closet. To the east of the study, we have the cheese room. It is exactly what it sounds like – a room dedicated to storing Bill’s lovely collection of curdy commestibles along with a table and three chairs for those times when you just need to sit down and enjoy some fermented milk.

South of the cheese room is the second pantry, which in turn leads into Bill’s suite of rooms in the southeast. Unlike the guest suite, Bill’s bedroom is tucked well into the hill and has no windows; instead, the windows are in the sitting room where his oversized bathing tub is located, adjacent to his own water closet.

The southwest portion of the house is the primary eating areas, with the dining room just off the main hall, the kitchen to the south with the main pantry beside it. To the north of the kitchen is the “snack kitchen” where Bill prepares (and often eats) smaller meals such as sandwiches. And then we come to the crux of the matter – the source of much of the rumours about the Burrowes residence; the secret room.

Connected to the cheese room and Bill’s bedroom there is a secret passage that leads to the ‘wine cellar’ where Bill stores his more expensive foods and wines that he doesn’t break out for just any guest or visitor. That’s it. A secret wine cellar. Not a single gold coin to be found there. And definitely no secret hatch in the floor that may lead somewhere even more secret!

*This map (and perhaps a map of the obviously non-existent areas beneath) was drawn for James Michael Spahn, our very own hobbit in the OSR.*

*The 1200 dpi versions of the map were drawn at a scale of 300 pixels per square and are 9,600 x 12,000 pixels (32 x 40 squares) at 3 feet per square, as suits a nice little halfling home.*

[https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/05/22/a-lovely-little-home-in-the-shire/](https://dysonlogos.blog/2026/05/22/a-lovely-little-home-in-the-shire/)