Silgrad Tower from the Ashes

Have a look at this screenshot.

What do you notice just to the left of the arrow?

By the looks of it, the stone texture on the ground has some rocks protruding out of it.

Sure it could just be hand placed, but TBH it would be too time consuming to place objects that small all around the world.

Interesting - not sure if very good normal mapping could achieve that. Looking on the right, the "grass" seems to have improved from TES4 - perhaps small rocks are being treated the same way?

That was my first thought, that it might be some kind of grass-like feature.

Yeah looks like it's being treated the same way as grass, rather than actually generating the rocks, they'll be handplaced onto the texture in the landscape texture editor, and then they'll show up where ever the texture is used -if it's like that, then also potentially you could place other objects too, for example dead leaves, twigs, etc.