Twenty towers once watched over this causeway; three crumbling stumps do the job now, and do it well enough that no army has forced the Neck from the south in the memory of any maester now living. Ruin, it turns out, is not the same thing as ruined.
Moat Cailin sits at the one place in the Neck's hundred leagues of bog where dry ground and the causeway meet, which is precisely why the First Men raised it there in the Dawn of Days and why every army marching north since has had to reckon with it, whole or in ruin. The swamp does the rest of the work: quicksand, fever, lizard-lions, and crannogmen who know a hundred paths through the reeds that no map has ever recorded.
Time and neglect have done more to the fortress than any siege — of its twenty towers only three still stand, cracked and leaning — yet the ground itself remains the chokepoint it always was. An army strung single-file along a raised road, with bog on both sides and poisoned arrows in the reeds, learns quickly enough why the North has never much bothered to rebuild the rest of the walls.
In the timeline
SourcesTWOIAF · The NorthAGOT · CatelynACOK · Catelyn
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House seated here
Where is Moat Cailin?
Twenty towers once watched over this causeway; three crumbling stumps do the job now, and do it well enough that no army has forced the Neck from the south in the memory of any maester now living. Ruin, it turns out, is not the same thing as ruined.
Is Moat Cailin from the books or the show?
Book canon. This entry follows George R. R. Martin's novels and histories, and notes where the television series diverges rather than following it.