The Tower Hills

West of the Far Downs, on the road from the Shire to the Grey Havens, the ground rises into a line of hills on whose summits stand three tall, slender towers of white stone. Hobbits could see them from the Far Downs on clear days, and it was said in the Shire that from the top of the tallest one could see the Sea. The towers were built in the Second Age by Gil-galad as a gift to Elendil, and in the highest of them, Elostirion, Elendil set one of the palantíri of the North. This Stone was unlike the others: it did not communicate with the rest, but looked only west across the Sea to the Master-stone in Tol Eressëa, and Elendil used it to gaze toward the Undying Lands that were lost to him.

The hills were never part of the Shire in the Third Age; they belonged to the Elves, and Círdan's people from Lindon still climbed Elostirion from time to time to look into the Stone. Frodo dreamed of the tower and the Sea beyond it at Crickhollow, and in September 3021, on the road to the Havens, Elrond and Galadriel's company rode past the hills with the palantír that had looked west for so long.

Elostirion's Stone belonged to the Elves in the sense that Elendil's heirs did not use it after the founding of Arnor, and it was not carried away to Fornost when the North fell. When the Ring-bearers sailed in 3021, Círdan took the Stone with him aboard the white ship, and the last palantír of the North went back over the Sea. In Fo.A. 31 (S.R. 1452) King Elessar added the land between the Far Downs and the Tower Hills to the Shire as the Westmarch. Sam Gamgee's daughter Elanor married Fastred of Greenholm and settled at Undertowers on the eastern slopes, where Fastred became Warden of the Westmarch. Sam gave the Red Book to Elanor before he went to the Havens, and it was kept by her descendants, the Fairbairns of the Towers, from whom the histories of the War of the Ring were copied.

A range of hills about fifty miles west of the White Downs, between the Far Downs and the Gulf of Lune, on the road from the Shire to the Grey Havens; the three towers stand on the western heights, Undertowers on the eastern slope.