Moat Cailin

The First Men raised Moat Cailin some ten thousand years ago where the Neck opens into the North. It had twenty towers once, a timber keep, and a curtain wall of black basalt as high as Winterfell’s. The keep rotted away a thousand years ago. Of the wall only great blocks remain, half sunk in the bog.

Three towers stand. The Gatehouse Tower is the largest, low and broad, with some of its walls still around it. The Drunkard’s Tower leans where the south and west walls once met. The Children’s Tower is tall and thin, half its crown gone, and the tale says the children of the forest called down the hammer of the waters from its top to break the Neck.

The kingsroad runs between the towers on its causeway, and a host coming north must pass under all three, through chest-deep muck and a moat thick with lizard-lions. The Andals broke on it again and again. No army from the south has ever taken it, though its northern face was built with no thought of attack.