For a post town, there is nowhere flat. Magome is built along a stone-paved slope that runs straight through the settlement; partway up, Mount Ena appears over the roofs, and at the top the road continues into the pass. Post towns were normally sited on level ground, for the obvious reason that a person carrying a load prefers not to climb. Magome climbs anyway, which tells you the position was decided by the shape of the ridge rather than by the convenience of the highway that ran across it.

Inns and places to eat line both sides, and the houses sit on stacked stone footings that step up the hill, so from the street the roofline rises in stages rather than in a continuous line. Nakatsugawa is about thirty minutes away by car. The work here is lodging and food, and because the village sits at the top of the slope, ordinary shopping means going down and coming back up again. Plenty of people walk over the pass to the next post town, so on a fine morning those setting out from here pass those who set out from the other side, somewhere near the summit.

A slope is harder to walk and shows you more. On a level street the buildings in front hide everything behind them; on a climb, each new frontage appears above the last, so a road of a given length delivers considerably more to look at. Magome is not a long town — it can be walked in twenty minutes if you are in a hurry — and yet it takes most people considerably longer than that, and they rarely notice where the extra time went. The gradient is doing the work that a longer street would otherwise have to do.