The road that ran eastward from the Misty Mountains came down from the High Pass, crossed the Great River Anduin at the Old Ford, and then carried on eastward into the trees of Mirkwood. This road, originally made by the Dwarves, was ancient indeed, dating back at least to the early years of the Second Age, and so the crossing of the Old Ford must itself have been in use for at least six thousand years by the end of the Third Age.
The place where the Old Ford stood was said to be the most southerly point at which Anduin could be safely crossed, because the floor of its valley sloped more steeply downward from that point, and therefore the river began to run more rapidly. Anduin did not become slow or shallow again until it reached the Undeeps, more than three hundred miles to the south. In its earlier days, then, the Old Ford would thus have been the a major crossing point, used especially by Dwarves passing from Khazad-dûm to and from the mansions of other clans in the East.
At one point this crossing was not merely a ford, but was marked by a bridge that spanned the Great River. At the end of the Second Age, the Elves and Men of the Last Alliance needed a way for their armies to pass out of the northwestern lands of Middle-earth down the Vales of Anduin to Mordor, and they rebuilt and strengthened the old bridge for this purpose.
We do not know how long this bridge survived, but it had ceased to exist by the later years of the Third Age (maps of events in III 2941 label the crossing as the 'Old Ford', so the bridge had been lost before that date). One possibility is that the bridge was broken in the same terrible flooding that destroyed the Bridge of Tharbad in III 2912, though the fact that it was known as the 'Old Ford' just twenty-nine years later does tend to suggest that the bridge had fallen rather earlier than this.
In this same time period, decades before the War of the Ring, the Old Forest Road had begun to fall into decay at its eastern end and sink into the Long Marshes beyond the trees of Mirkwood. Thus the ford lay on a road that was no longer usable, and seems itself to have fallen out of use. Later accounts describe a Ford of Carrock, which lay about thirty miles upriver from the Old Ford,2 and led to the Elf-path through the Forest. In earlier times there was no true crossing at the Carrock, so it seems that the Beornings must have created a ford at some point to replace the defunct Old Ford to the south.
Notes
1 |
The road into Mirkwood (later known as the Old Forest Road) was made by Dwarves in the early Second Age and, as the place later known as the Old Ford was the point where this road crossed Anduin, it seems that the ford itself was also in use this early. Presumably the Dwarves who made the road also raised the original bridge at the crossing. |
2 |
We assume there that the Ford of Carrock was literally at the Carrock, and its name certainly seems to imply this. However, when Thorin and the Dwarves passed this way in III 2941, there was explicitly no ford across the river at the Carrock. Based on the name, it would seem that the Beornings later set about creating a ford there to replace the Old Ford. An alternative reading might be that the 'Ford of Carrock' was simply another name for the Old Ford (this seems significantly less likely, but is perhaps not impossible).
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- Updated 10 August 2026
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