Incidentally I think this is Stirland's primary geography type based on the Haunted Hills and our fief's description(and also that bloody spring that Gustav rocked to death):
Karst - Wikipedia
Farming in karst areas must take into account the lack of surface water. The soils may be fertile enough, and rainfall may be adequate, but rainwater quickly moves through the crevices into the ground, sometimes leaving the surface soil parched between rains.
A karst fenster occurs when an underground stream emerges onto the surface between layers of rock, cascades some distance, and then disappears back down, often into a sinkhole. Rivers in karst areas may disappear underground a number of times and spring up again in different places, usually under a different name (like Ljubljanica, the river of seven names).
Water supplies from wells in karst topography may be unsafe, as the water may have run unimpeded from a sinkhole in a cattle pasture, through a cave and to the well, bypassing the normal filtering that occurs in a porous aquifer. Karst formations are cavernous and therefore have high rates of permeability, resulting in reduced opportunity for contaminants to be filtered. Groundwater in karst areas is just as easily polluted as surface streams. Sinkholes have often been used as farmstead or community trash dumps. Overloaded or malfunctioning septic tanks in karst landscapes may dump raw sewage directly into underground channels.
The karst topography also poses difficulties for human inhabitants. Sinkholes can develop gradually as surface openings enlarge, but progressive erosion is frequently unseen until the roof of an underground cavern suddenly collapses. Such events have swallowed homes, cattle, cars, and farm machinery.
Short version for anyone who doesn't feel like going on a wiki-walk:
-The topsoil is kept dry because the bedrock is porous. You can't really irrigate, the water falls straight through.
-Deep rooted plants normally used in arid environments fail because they will not reach aquifers, but WILL hit limestone first.
-Fertilizers will fail because the soil is dry, not because the soil is bad.
-The groundwater is literally shitty. We might want to personally supervise well construction if we don't want to spread disease.
-The ground may or may not be actually stable(we probably should have realized this from the Sunken Palace). We might seriously want a dwarf mineral survey or a dwarf construction crew before building anything particularly heavy on it.
-Caves, underground rivers and tunnels everywhere. Oh and the caves can move around slowly because the water will both erode and deposit limestone. And water can sometimes flow uphill via underground rivers(remember the mystery self filling ponds in hilltops?) via natural siphons and pressure.
-Iron and copper ores are somewhat uncommon, but present. Granted, iron ore is literally everywhere, so an iron mine here is fiddly and potentially unprofitable.
-Lots of fossils if you dig deep enough. Lets hope no necromancers are organized enough to try a Harry Dresden.
Well, either way, this explains how poorly developed the land is.
The entire central Stirland is a huge spread of similar hills of similarly dry soil, and the areas where you might expect thicker topsoil are covered in dense forests.
No wonder Moot Revanchism is such a big deal to Stirlanders. The Moot is around 20% of all farmland in the province and 60% of all the floodplains!
