Ruthenia, south of Turka

The above is a long shot of all Ruthenia, with the small section at the top still undone.  This is the far east extension of the remaining Hungarian Kingdom in the mid-17th century, with the Ottoman Empire to the south and Poland to the north.  The Lithuanian element of Poland was united, finally, with Poland in 1569, with the Union of Lublin.

We have a few more populated areas to create, especially as we enter the Polish county of Lwow (modern Lviv), of which the four settlements of Turka, Borislav, Bych and Stryj are a part, as shown on the completed map below:

The very small road shown creeping out of the left hex and into Poland should have gone into the right-hand hex, with an infrastructure of 241 ... however, the terrain is so dense with mountains, the lack of a pass drove the road westward towards Turka instead.  There's certain to be a Turka-based road that comes south and meets it.  Still, because my system allows the hex only one connection (see the table on this link), the route stops at the river, making a half-mile gap.

Keep in mind that the light greenish-brown route is a "cart path" ... used so infrequently that the ruts are not maintained with stone, with vegetation encroaching on the route.  Too, a route like this is probably hundreds of years old.  Once, it might have been a dirt road, but it's degraded over time, due to the collapse of trade between south and north.  This suggests that the hex itself may include an abandoned village, now occupied by a small remnant of farmers who cling to the lands of their ancestors.  We can see from this how the incongruity of the road causes us to come up with a good reason why it's apparently unsuited to the environment.  This is better than linking up the road at the bottom, which only contributes to a dull consistency that suggests nothing to see here.

Anyway, we have this small sea of mountains, 20 by 40 miles.  Now, rather than do one post today, I want to jump 30 miles north and west, as shown by the long arrow on this post.

This is Upper Hungary, around Bartfa (modern Bardejov):

The section is an area of low hills, rising to above 2000 feet in the northeast corner.  The reader should remember that I grow intimate with each of these sections through GoogleEarth.  Here's a slanted shot of the hills I'm speaking of:

This is quite different from the mountains in Ruthenia, above.  The vertical ratio is 3:1, as this helps elucidate the terrain's nature.  We can see that there's more than enough room for all the people on the map below to live. 

This is the last of the Kingdom of Hungary for a long while, and the last of Slovakia also.  This section is entirely on the Ruthenia sheet, but some of it is duplicated on Nyatria, so I have one last chore to do today.

Starting back on the 9th of November, I created the Nyatrian sheet because the map had spilled that far west.  Now I've done the last that I'm going to do on it until coming back around in a clockwise circle by way of the Black Sea.  Here's how it looks on its own:

From here, it gets left behind.  Later, I'll link it up with pages on the east and south, and post that map as it's own post.  Onto the Ukraine.