Her aunt shrugged. "Some of them say they are. Others are just people who don't like to live in houses, in one place. they'd rather move around and be free. We have a fair number of them down by us."Nita filed this with about twenty other things she was going to have to ask more about at her leisure. They passed more small housing developments –'estates', her aunt called them – where houses sited by themselves seemed to be the exception rather than the rule. Rather, two houses were usually built squished together so that they shared one wall, and each one was a mirror image of the other.And then even the housing estates started to give out. There was a last gasp of them as they passed through a town called Shankill, where the road had narrowed down to a single lane each way again. Shortly after that it curved off to the right, away from what looked like an even larger town. "That's Bray," Aunt Annie said. "We do some of our shopping there. But this is officially County Wicklow, now: you're out of Dublin when you get near the Dargle."Nita hadn't noticed the river: it was hidden behind rows of little houses. "That's Little Bray," her aunt said. "And now, here's Kilcroney."The road widened out abruptly into hill and forest, and two lanes on each side again. "Everything has names," Nita said."Every acre of this place has names," her aunt said. "Every town has "townlands" around it, and every one of them has a different name. Almost every field, and every valley and hill." She smiled. "I rather like it.""I think I might too," Nita said. A wizard could best do spells when everything in them was completely named: and it was always easier to use existing names than to coin new ones – which you had to do if no-one had previously named a thing or place, or if it didn't know its own name already. And the name you coined had to be right, otherwise the wizardry would backfire. "There," her aunt said, maneuvering around a couple of curves in the road. "There's our mountain."
