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)