Goatswood, first detailed in the story "The Moon-Lens", is an isolated town surrounded by woods to the east of Brichester. The narrator of that story is struck by the town's atmosphere: "The close-set dull-red roofs, the narrow streets, the encircling forests—all seemed somehow furtive." As in Lovecraft's Innsmouth, the residents of Goatswood have a distinctive, offputting appearance; a typical resident is described as "revoltingly goatlike", resembling "a medieval woodcut of a satyr", and clad in "grotesquely voluminous" garments.
The most prominent feature of Goatswood is the titular Moon-Lens: A "metal pylon, 50 feet high, rose from the center of the square. At the top (is)...a large convex lens surrounded by an arrangement of mirrors, and all hinged on a pivot attached to the ground by taut ropes." It is said by a perhaps unreliable character to have been built by the Romans.
Goatswood is sometimes an unavoidable connection on the train route from Exham to Brichester. The infrequent visitors to Goatswood, "The Moon Lens" reveals, eat at the Station Cafe and stay at the Central Hotel.
In a later story, "Made in Goatswood", the village has more to offer to outsiders: a curiosity shop with a toad-like proprietor whose "hands were brown and crinkled as the paper in which he wrapped the parcels", selling disturbing lawn ornaments; a fruit stand in a "canvas stall like a shrine" where fruit resembling peaches are offered by a girl whose "eyelids lowered wickedly". There's even a red light district, Fitzroy Street, on the edge of town:
- (B)efore the woods closed in, a last street of dingy houses lay exhausted between gardens high with grass, uneven with rocks, and on the corner a newspaper-shop, its cramped windows full of yellow cards; baked mud preserved the tracks of cars.
"The Franklyn Paragraphs" mentions a number of places visited by "the circle of young men" around occultist Roland Franklyn—Goatswood among them.
In the "woods toward toward Goatswood" is a clearing, according to "The Insects of Shaggai", where a "meteorite" fell in the 17th century; a coven that subsequently worshipped there was executed by real-life witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. In the clearing may be found a mysterious gray cone, home to the titular creatures; the story "The Moon Lens" alludes to this artifact.
These woods also feature in "The Enchanted Fruit", whose protagonist at first finds them enticing—"Each corridor of trees seemed made to be explored, each green shadow promised mystery"—and later forbidding: "A screen of leaves seemed secretive; parted, it revealed only vistas of dim branches." In the forest, he finds a tree whose "rich trunk, dark yet warm, stood alone on a mound of autumn built high from the edge of the glade"; he eats the fruit of this tree, "large as apples, soft and shaped as peaches", to his immediate delight and later regret.
Read more about this topic: Severn Valley (Cthulhu Mythos), Locations