Fifty metres is only the start

Last week we showed you the first page of our sketchbook and the Kin, the standing stone with your family name on it. The land around it starts as a circle of fifty metres, but that circle is only the seed. Every finished piece your village builds claims five more metres around itself, so a wall raised near the edge pushes the border outwards.

There is one condition: the land has to stay connected to the stone. A hut built on its own far away, with nothing linking it back to the Kin, is outside your land, and outside the land anyone can tear it down and anything left alone is gone in twenty hours. Borders in Kinhenge are not lines on a map. They are the shape of what a family has actually built, and if the pieces holding an edge are destroyed in a war, that ground is lost again.

A village built one piece at a time

There are no ready-made houses. Foundations, walls, floors, roofs, gables, doors and stairs go up one module at a time on a three metre grid, planned with a stone hammer and fed with material carried in by hand. Even the triangle that closes a roof is built: a wide gable takes six clean logs, and every clean log is a raw trunk worked with a strong knife.

Stronger materials, more hands

Straw and wood are open to everyone. A family alone can raise a hut, a fence, even a small long house, if it is patient. Stone and brick are different. Only a stonemason can shape the modules, and every character in Kinhenge follows one trade in a lifetime. Anyone can try other work, but the gap between an amateur and someone who does it for a living is huge: the amateur works slowly, makes little and makes it badly.

The further an island moves through history, the longer the chains get. A wall stops being a bundle of straw and becomes stone that has to be quarried, cut, carried and set, each step with its own tools and its own people. You can still do it all yourself. It will take a very long time, and the wall will not be as good as one built by a stonemason with villagers who quarry and carry for them.

Why we built it this way

Kinhenge is about families living next to other families. The rules push the same way: the land rewards building together, and the best materials need the people who know them. A village with a good stonemason grows faster and holds its ground better. A village without one has a reason to trade, or to invite someone in.