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Among the Talvern communities of the fictional highland region of Ossenmoor, the practice of "stone-naming" has persisted for at least three centuries as a means of recording family history without written text. Each household maintains a cairn of small stones near its dwelling, and upon the birth of a child, the family selects a stone from a nearby riverbed and adds it to the cairn, often marking it with a symbol representing a hoped-for trait or a recent significant event. Anthropologists who documented the practice in the 1970s assumed it functioned primarily as a genealogical record, since counting the stones in a cairn allowed elders to state roughly how many generations a family had lived in a given valley. However, a more recent ethnographic study conducted between 2015 and 2021 found that stone-naming carries a second, less obvious function: mediating land disputes. Because Ossenmoor has no formal land registry, cairns have effectively served as informal proof of long-term habitation, and elders are sometimes called upon to arbitrate disputes by comparing the relative size and age of neighboring families' cairns. The same study noted that the practice is now declining, particularly among younger Talvern families who have moved to lowland towns for work, and fewer than a third of households under thirty maintain an active cairn, compared with over 90 percent of households over sixty. Several community leaders have begun documenting existing cairns photographically, partly out of concern that the practice's disappearance would also erode an informal but functional system of dispute resolution that has operated successfully for generations without formal legal backing. Researchers note that similar informal land-marking customs, though rarely called stone-naming, appear in a handful of other regions with limited access to centralized legal or administrative institutions.