3.1. Geography (South of the Wall)
- The North is nearly as large as the other six kingdoms put together (I: 33)
- The North is not heavily populated, largely bogs and fields and forests, with few large inns to be found even on the kingsroad (I: 33)
- The barrows of the First Men are spread throughout the North (I: 93)
- The kingsroad past Winterfell is little more than a forest track (I: 99)
- To the west of the kingsroad, as it goes north after passing Winterfell, the land is mostly flint hills and often capped with watchtowers. The land to the east is lower, rolling plains. Stone bridges span swift, narrow rivers (I: 99)
- Farms extend in rings from holdfasts (I: 99)
- There are rude inns to be found along the kingsroad (I: 99)
- Three days from Winterfell the land grows more and more mountainous, heavily forested, and little populated. Within the fifth day of riding north of Winterfell, the hills have given way to mountains (I: 99)
- The large forest north and west of Winterfell is the wolfswood (I: 100)
- A wooden holdfast sits on the edge of the wolfswood (I: 100)
- Nights are well below freezing further north of Winterfell, even in the late summer (I: 101)
- Eighteen days ride north from Winterfell stands an abandoned holdfast (I: 106)
- The White Knife River leads to White Harbor and the sea (I: 115)
- The causeway cutting through the Neck is very narrow (I: 118)
- The Neck is a vast boggy swamp, with pools of mud and quicksand, and flowers unique to the region (I: 118)
- Mole's Town is a little village half a league south of Wall, on the kingsroad (I: 176)
- It is rare to find a grove of two or three weirwoods together (I: 434)
- Mole's Town is bigger than it seems, but three-quarters of it is underground tunnels and damp warm cellars (I: 648)
- Mole's Town's whorehouse is marked by a wooden shack no larger than a privy with a red lantern hung outside (I: 648)
- It takes about a fortnight to sail from Lannisport to Bear Island (II: 146)
- A barge can be taken some of the way from White Harbor to Winterfell (II: 179)
- Cerwyn Castle lies half a day's ride from Winterfell (II: 190)
- The Stony Shore is on the western coast. Various fishing villages line it (II: 290)
- Sea Dragon Point is on the western coast, and must be rounded by sea before one can get to the tidal flats north of Deepwood Motte (II: 290)
- Saltspear is the long, narrow bay west of the Neck. It connects to the Fever River, whose headwaters are less than twenty miles from Moat Cailin (II: 290)
- The Stony Shore is south of Deepwood Motte, the villages on it near to Torrhen's Square (II: 395)
- There are people (and perhaps lords) who live deep inside the wolfswood (II: 487)
- The edge of the forest to the west of Winterfell has a stony ground (II: 531)
- Northwest of Winterfell is the heart of the wolfswood (II: 531)
- Deepwood Motte is north by northwest of Winterfell on the other side of the wolfswood (II: 531)
- Sentinels and soldier pines grow thick in the wolfswood, making it dark and gloomy before they give way to oaks and hawthorns amongst stony hills. The ground is uneven (II: 531)
- There are quarries in the wolfswood (II: 532)
- There is a muddy brook two or three hours north by northwest of Winterfell (II: 532)
- There's an old mill sitting alone on the Acorn Water. There are a dozen villages and holdfasts arrayed in the same general area (II: 535)
- Skagos is a large island in the Bay of Seals. Because of its remoteness, it has little contact with the mainland and although in theory subject to the Starks, in practice its lords go their own way (II: 544. SSM: 1)
- Brandon's Gift and the New Gift stretch from the Wall to fifty leagues south of it (III: 83, 452, 453)
- Even in the deep of the wolfswood there are foresters, crofters, and hunters (III: 105)
- There are no roads through the twisted mountain valleys in the northern part of the North past the wolfswood. Beneath the grey stone peaks lay still blue lakes, long and deep and narrow, and there are endless piney woods (III: 274)
- The foothills of the northern mountains are largely of flint (III: 274)
- Conifers such as pine and sentinel trees become increasingly common as one goes north from the wolfswood, until they're the only trees (III: 274)
- The high glens in the mountains rarely run straight north and south (III: 275)
- The mountain streams are small and icy, and the game is scarcer (III: 275)
- People live near and in the mountains. The Umbers are mostly east of the kingsroad, but they graze their sheep in the high meadows in the summer. Of the mountain clans, there are Wulls west of the mountains along the Bay of Ice, Harclays in the southern hills, and Knotts, Liddles, Norreys, and even some Flints up in the high places (III: 275, 573. SSM: 1)
- Queenscrown is an old village, abandoned for some years because of increasing problems with wildling raiders, with a stout holdfast on an island in a lake south of the village where oak trees grow thick along the shore, and apple trees grow as well near the inn. It lies within the New Gift (III: 452, 453, 457, 468)
- The land between Queenscrown and the Wall is largely grassland: fallow fields and low rolling hills, high meadows and lowland bogs (III: 452, 468)
- The New Gift belongs to the Night's Watch, as does Brandon's Gift which lies north of it. It's said that Brandon the Builder gave all the land south of the Wall to the black brothers, to a distance of twenty-five leagues, for their sustenance and support, but some maesters say that it was some other Brandon, not the Builder (III: 452, 453)
- Thousands of years after the creation of Brandon's gift, Good Queen Alysanne visited the Wall on her dragon Silverwing, and she thought the Night's Watch was so brave that she had the Old King double the size of their lands to fifty leagues, making the New Gift (III: 453)
- Wildling raids have increased over the last years as the Watch has grown weaker, and so the places nearest the Wall have been raided so often that people have moved further south into the mountains or into the Umber lands east of the kingsroad (III: 453)
- At Queenscrown a stone causeway three feet wide, hidden under the water, provides a way to reach the holdfast in the lake. Its path twists and turns so as not to be easily followed, and so that enemies will be exposed to arrows for a longer time (III: 453, 454, 468)
- Good Queen Alysanne slept in the holdfast at Queenscrown, so the folk of the village painted the holdfast's merlons gold in her honor (III: 454, 468)
- The holdfast at Queenscrown is closed by a heavy oak door guarding a small strongroom where steps leading up the tower and down into the undervault are guarded by iron gates. A small iron grate set into the ceiling serves as a murder holes. The tower has five floors (III: 454, 455, 468)
- The second story of the holdfast is a maze of dark cells with no windows, the third story has arrow slits, the fourth has proper windows, and the fifth is a big round chamber with arched doors on three sides opening onto small stone balconies. The fourth side is a privy chamber perched above a sewer chute that drops straight into the lake (III: 455)
- There are trees in the Neck that stand twice as a tall as a five story tower (III: 455)
- South of Queenscrown are the foothills and their mountains, but in all other directions are the rolling plains of the New Gift (III: 455, 456, 468)
- There are ancient and abandoned towerhouses throughout the New Gift, remnants of the small lords who had once resided there (III: 460)
- A dozen streams drain the wetwood of the Neck, all shallow, silty, and uncharted. They cannot even be called rivers, as the channels are always drifting and changing. There are endless sandbars, deadfalls, and tangles of rotting trees (III: 525)
- There are ways through the Neck that are not on any map, known only to the crannogmen, such as narrow trails between the bogs and wet roads through the reeds that only boats can follow (III: 526)
- Weatherback Ridge is near to Castle Black and is within view of the kingsroad. A beacon burning there can be seen from the castle (III: 553)
- Past Skagos is the Shivering Sea (III: 608)
- There are no weirwoods on the stony island in the lake at Queenscrown (III: 626)
- The shore of the Bay of Seals is wooded, and snarled by rocks and whirlpools (IV: 216)
- The journey by galley from Eastwatch to Braavos is said to be a long one (IV: 217)
- The waters of the narrow sea beyond Skagos are rough in the autumn (IV: 217)
- Skagos sits at the mouth of the Bay of Seals, mountainous and forbidding, with the savage people who live there residing in caves or grim mountain fastnesses (IV: 220)
- The isle of Skane, near to Skagos, is uninhabited after men from Skagos allegedly attacked, killing and then eating all those they found there (IV: 220)
- The currents around Skagos are treacherous (IV: 220-221)
- The region of Sea Dragon Point and the Stony Shore of the North are ten times larger than all the Iron Isles combined. It is a thinly populated area (IV: 265)
- The autumn storms between Skagos and Braavos can be fierce, and sometimes bring a terrible cold that can freeze ropes and sails (IV: 380)
- The journey from Dorne to the North is a long one, taking months (SSM: 1)
Last revised July 28, 2009
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3.1.1. Moat Cailin
- Moat Cailin commands the causeway through the Neck. Great basalt stones as large as cottages once made up a curtain wall as high as that of Winterfell's. The wooden keep was rotted away a thousand years past. Only three of the original twenty towers the singers claim remain of the great stronghold of the First Men (I: 498)
- Moat Cailin's Gatehouse Tower is sound and boasts a few feet of standing wall to either side (I: 498)
- The Drunkard's Tower in the bog where the south and west walls had once met, leans heavily (I: 498)
- The tall, slender Children's Tower has lost half its crown (I: 498)
- All three towers are green with moss, and a tree was growing out from between the stones on the north side of the Gatehouse Tower (I: 499)
- Moat Cailin is surrounded by quicksands and suckholes and is teeming with snakes. An army would have to wade through waist-deep muck and a moat full of lizard-lions, and then scale walls slippery with moss while archers fired from the other towers (I: 499)
- Saltspear is the long, narrow bay west of the Neck. It connects to the Fever River, whose headwaters are less than twenty miles from Moat Cailin (II: 290)
- It seems that Moat Cailin has stood for some 10,000 years (II: 674)
- A dozen streams drain the wetwood of the Neck, all shallow, silty, and uncharted. They cannot even be called rivers, as the channels are always drifting and changing. There are endless sandbars, deadfalls, and tangles of rotting trees (III: 525)
- There are ways through the Neck that are not on any map, known only to the crannogmen, such as narrow trails between the bogs and wet roads through the reeds that only boats can follow (III: 526)
Last revised February 28, 2007
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3.1.2. Trade and Resources
- Wool is one important trade item from the North (II: 200)
- There are silversmiths at White Harbor (III: 837)
Last revised February 28, 2007
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