Vigil over the Shire.

"Forty leagues it stretched from the Far Downs to the Brandywine Bridge, and fifty from the northern moors to the marshes in the south. The Hobbits named it the Shire, as the region of the authority of their Thain, and a district of well-ordered business; and there in that pleasant corner of the world they plied their well-ordered business of living, and they heeded less and less the world outside where dark things moved, until they came to think that peace and plenty were the rule in Middle-earth and the right of all sensible folk. They forgot or ignore what little they had ever known of the Guardians, and of the labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire. They were in, fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it." – Concerning Hobbits, The Fellowship of the Ring