Ashford was a town rather than a fortress, and General Snowe understood the distinction precisely, which was why he had chosen it.
The settlement occupied the confluence of the River Ashwell's two principal tributaries, a natural chokepoint where roads from three provincial directions converged at a series of stone bridges that were, individually, narrower than the North Bridge crossing but collectively more complex to force because they were distributed across four hundred paces of converging waterways.
An army assaulting from a single direction could not bypass all of them without exposing its flanks to the defenders who held the bridges it had left untouched. An army assaulting all of them simultaneously would need to divide its force into elements small enough that the garrison could defeat them in detail.
