After passing Nagara Ichirizuka Milestone, you can see “shishigaki” stone walls, which were built in the Edo Era to protect fields from deer and wild boar. They were initially over two meters in height, but parts of the stone walls have now collapsed. The total distance of the stone fences in this area is said to be several hundred kilometers. The people who built them surely had to work hard, like those who built the Great Wall of China.

Due to a lack of flat land, fields were created by developing the mountainous terrain. The crops were often ransacked by deer and boar, which led to the laborious task of building these fences. Because the shishigaki fences required an incredible amount of time and labor, records say that the farmers were not able to pay their annual rice taxes, and had to ask the local governor for an exemption.

The cobblestone and shishigaki fences along the Kodō used enormous quantities of stone, but the surrounding mountains provided plenty of rocks, allowing people to gather resources on-site.