Hardy adventurers who journey up the Valorde North Road to the Old North Bridge may be amazed to find sizeable numbers of orcs and goblins marauding about in this desolate wasteland. While the horrid things may feast on one another when the times require it (and no foolish tourists are available), the question of where they find shelter from the harsh northern weather is another puzzle altogether.
The solution to this puzzle lies hidden in a deep dell only a short distance north and west of the old stone bridge itself. There, invisible from the surrounding plain in its grotto, stands the ruin of an ancient dwarvish Temple. One should never venture into this pit without a large, experienced, well-armed party of warriors, for at the first sign of your approach, many orcs and goblins will come boiling out of their various concealments and attack you with unaccustomed fury. Those who have studied these beasts suspect that a brood-queen of either goblins or orcs, or possibly both, may be lodged deep in the recesses of this ruin, explaining the creatures' fury--both orcs and goblins are rumored to breed nearly all males, with one insect-like queen ruling over colonies of the disgusting monsters.
If you by chance win your way down into the Temple ruins and clear away enough of these creatures, you will find at the back western end of the lowest level a tunnel mouth that leads mostly south (almost parallel to the Valorde North Road) beneath the hilly plain. A little more than a hundred lengths into this smooth stone passage, cleanly-cut and obviously of dwarvish origin, anyone foolish enough to reach so far will encounter two successive small chambers with smooth, carven walls. These once served as the tombs of dwarf kings and nobles, safely stored at the foot of their beloved mountain (before it acquired the hideous name of Orcrag) and convenient to their once-splendid Temple. Some dwarvish magic still may linger in these rooms, as the air is not so foul as in the Temple itself, and the orcs and goblins appear to dislike these places, hurrying through them if they are forced to go that way.
After the Dwarf Tombs, the Temple Gallery bends more to the south-west and passes into the rocky massif of the Orcrag itself. Roughly a thousand lengths from the eastern entrance at the ruined Temple, under the very pinnacle of the Orcrag, another tunnel or gallery leads off to the north--this is the Spiral Gallery, so-called for obvious reasons.
After the branching off of the Spiral Gallery, The Temple Gallery continues onward to the southeast for less than 200 lengths more, nearly emerging on the crag's western flank in the Shadow Springs Gap. Rather than such a western gate, however, The Temple Gallery ends here under the western flank of Orcrag, crossed in the manner of a letter "T" by a perpendicular passage. The right-hand turning, climbing steeply up a stone chimney, is the Bridge Gallery, and the left-hand turning, plunging downward, is the Shadow Spring Gallery, which of course leads south and down to the Springs of the same name.
