The Wall
Three hundred miles of ice, seven hundred feet high, raised at the end of the Long Night to hold back what waits in the cold. This is how the Wall was made, how vast it truly is, the nineteen castles set along it, and the old magic said to be woven through the ice.
Who built the Wall
The Wall is the greatest work of men that ever was, and no man living knows for certain who raised it. The tale the North keeps is that it was thrown up at the end of the Long Night, some eight thousand years past, when the Others had been driven back beyond the world's edge and men resolved they should never come again.
Brandon the Builder is the name the songs give the maker — the same legendary Stark credited with Winterfell and with half the old marvels of the North. The singers add that he did not labour alone: that the giants lent their strength to lift the great blocks of ice, and that the children of the forest wove spells into the frozen rampart to bind it against the dead. Giants, children, and a man who lived long enough to raise three wonders in one lifetime — the maesters set all this down, and believe as much of it as they must, which is little. What is certain is that the Wall stands, and that no ordinary masonry could have raised it.
How big is the Wall
A hundred leagues of ice, from the Bay of Ice in the west to the Bay of Seals in the east, warding the whole northern edge of the realm.
Seven hundred feet of ice at its tallest, broad enough along the top for a dozen mounted knights to ride abreast.
The figures are the Watch's own and vary with the drifts and the ages; the Wall grows in the telling and, some brothers swear, in truth, for the black brothers have added to it across the centuries. Its top is a road of ice, wound and rutted, patrolled against wildlings and worse.
The nineteen castles of the Night's Watch
Nineteen castles were raised along the Wall in the pride of the Watch, when ten thousand men held the ice. In the novels' day fewer than a thousand black brothers remain, and only three castles are still manned. The rest stand empty, some fallen to ruin, their gates sealed and their tunnels choked with ice — an unmanned wall with too few watchers upon it.
| Castle | Status | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Eastwatch-by-the-Sea | Manned | The easternmost castle, a port on the Bay of Seals where the Watch keeps its ships. |
| Woodswatch-by-the-Pool | Abandoned | Named for the small pool along its southern wall, within whose grounds a slender weirwood still grows inside one of the castle's roofless halls — the tree outliving the men who once kept watch beneath it. Between Queensgate and Sable Hall on the muster rolls, its buildings have fallen into some of the worst disrepair on the Wall, roofs collapsed and walls crumbling, though the pool and its weirwood endure. |
| Sable Hall | Abandoned | Between Woodswatch-by-the-Pool and Rimegate, empty and unmanned. In 50 AC the disgraced former Kingsguard knight Ser Raymund Mallery was set to rebuild it, then joined the revolt at neighboring Rimegate to claim both castles as private lordships, fleeing beyond the Wall once it collapsed. |
| Rimegate | Abandoned | Between Sable Hall and the Long Barrow, empty and unmanned. Its restoration was given in 50 AC to Ser Olyver Bracken, a disgraced former Kingsguard knight who rebelled to make it his own seat; retaken with Winterfell's aid, Lord Walton Stark beheaded him with the Stark greatsword Ice. |
| Long Barrow | Abandoned | Named, the maesters believe, for some far older grave mound the castle was raised beside or atop, though no surviving chronicle records whose barrow it was or what, if anything, still lies within it. Like the rest of this stretch of the Wall it was abandoned as the Watch's numbers thinned, leaving whatever the barrow holds undisturbed. |
| The Torches | Abandoned | Between the Long Barrow and Greenguard, empty and unmanned — one of many castles on this stretch the Watch could no longer spare the men to hold as its ranks thinned over the centuries. |
| Greenguard | Abandoned | The last of the small, sparsely chronicled castles before the Wall meets the sea, remembered chiefly for its place on the rolls between the Torches and Eastwatch. It shared the fate of most of the nineteen, given up as the Watch's ranks grew too thin to hold every gate along three hundred miles of ice. |
| Deep Lake | Abandoned | Raised seven miles east of the Nightfort along the shore of the lake that gives it its name, after Queen Alysanne Targaryen judged the older castle too vast and too grim for a shrinking Watch to keep. She paid for the building from her own jewels, and King Jaehaerys's masons spent eight years raising a seat sized for the Watch the order had actually become — yet even this more modest castle proved too much for later, thinner ranks, and it now stands as empty as the fortress it replaced. |
| Queensgate | Abandoned | Empty, near Castle Black, between Deep Lake and the Lord Commander's own seat. Raised first as Snowgate, it was renamed in honor of Queen Alysanne Targaryen after her progress along the Wall in 58 AC, when her gift of jewels funded Deep Lake; wildlings under Sylas the Grim overran it in 133 AC. |
| Castle Black | Manned | Seat of the Lord Commander and by far the largest of the Watch's garrisons, holding the greater share of the order's remaining brothers. It succeeded the Nightfort as the order's seat some six hundred years past, its position at the kingsroad's northern end making it the natural meeting point of the Seven Kingdoms and the Wall. It is not truly a castle in the old sense — the Wall alone defends its northern face, while stone towers and timber keeps, linked by tunnels dug beneath the frost, do the work walls would do elsewhere. |
| Oakenshield | Abandoned | Between Castle Black and the Nightfort, empty and unmanned. Its ruins still show the bones of a working castle — barrack towers, a collapsed keep that once housed its maester and commander, a feast hall with kitchens below, a ruined barn and smithy — linked by tunnels bored beneath the ice, as at Castle Black. |
| The Nightfort | Abandoned | The oldest and largest of the Watch's castles, and for six thousand years its seat, before Castle Black succeeded it some six hundred years past. Its broken halls carry the order's darkest legends: that a Lord Commander once crowned himself the Night's King and ruled in terror at his corpse-queen's side for thirteen years, and that a cook broke guest right by baking a king's son into a pie for his own father, a crime the gods are said to have answered by turning him into a monstrous rat that devours its own young. Beneath its kitchens lies the Black Gate, a door of pale weirwood grown in the shape of a face and warded by magic rather than men; Queen Alysanne Targaryen, finding the vast castle grim and its upkeep beyond a shrinking Watch's means, persuaded its Lord Commander to abandon it for the smaller seat raised seven miles east. |
| Icemark | Abandoned | Between Hoarfrost Hill and the Nightfort, empty and unmanned. Built large enough to garrison and provision a sizable company, it was among the more spacious of the Wall's lesser castles — and among the costliest to maintain once the Watch's numbers began to fall. |
| The Shadow Tower | Manned | The westernmost manned castle, guarding the Gorge where the Wall meets the mountains. |
| Sentinel Stand | Abandoned | Between the Shadow Tower and Greyguard on the Wall's western reach, empty and unmanned. It presumably takes its name from the sentinels, the tall grey-green evergreens common to the wolfswood and the haunted forest, that once grew thick along this stretch. |
| Greyguard | Abandoned | Half-ruined, its stair collapsed. |
| Stonedoor | Abandoned | Between Greyguard and Hoarfrost Hill, empty and unmanned, in hill country riddled with caves running back from the Wall into the earth. Its walls stand in noticeably better repair than ruined Greyguard beside it, the likelier of the two to be reclaimed. |
| Hoarfrost Hill | Abandoned | Between Stonedoor and Icemark, empty and unmanned. Little of its founding or its fall survives in what the Citadel has recorded — one more outpost given up wholesale as the Watch's numbers dwindled over the centuries. |
| Westwatch-by-the-Bridge | Abandoned | The westernmost castle of all, raised not upon the Wall's ice but atop the Bridge of Skulls, a stone span across the Gorge named for the bones littering the rocks below. The bridge offered raiders a way around the ice from the west, and Westwatch was built to guard that crossing; as the Watch's numbers thinned, its garrison was among the first the order could no longer spare, and the bridge it once guarded now stands open more often than shut. |
The order runs east to west, from the Bay of Seals to the shore of the Bay of Ice. The maesters' rolls do not always agree on the westerly names, and some of these castles are little more than a name and a heap of fallen stone; only Eastwatch, Castle Black, and the Shadow Tower hold living garrisons.
The magic in the ice
The Wall is more than ice, or so the oldest brothers hold. Spells are said to be woven through it — the wards of the children of the forest, laid at its raising — so that the dead and the Others cannot pass while it stands. Creatures of cold magic falter at it; a wight will not cross, and the wildlings, who fear such things more than any southron, have battered at the Wall for thousands of years and never yet brought it down for long.
At the abandoned Nightfort stands the Black Gate, a door of pale weirwood grown in the shape of a face, sunk deep beneath the castle. It opens only for a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch who speaks the words of the oath, and lets a traveller pass clean through the base of the Wall. The maesters, who mistrust all magic, record these tales without endorsing them — but the black brothers who keep the ice do not laugh at them, and that reticence is itself a kind of testimony.
The Gift and the New Gift
The Watch does not live on ice alone. Brandon's Gift, granted by Brandon the Builder in the dawn of the order, gave the black brothers the land for twenty-five leagues south of the Wall to farm and work, that the men who guarded the realm need not also starve.
Thousands of years later, Good Queen Alysanne Targaryen flew her dragon Silverwing to the Wall, was moved by the plight of the shrinking Watch, and prevailed upon her husband King Jaehaerys I to grant a second strip of land — the New Gift, another twenty-five leagues. In the novels' day both Gifts stand all but empty, their villages abandoned to wildling raids and hard winters, the fields the Watch was given to feed itself gone back to grass.
The Watch at the chronicle's edge
What the black brothers found beyond the Wall in the novels' latter days is veiled here for those who have not yet ranged so far north.
These partings name deaths, endings, and roads not yet ridden in the books. Unveil them only if both roads are known to you — or if you do not fear to know.
Common questions
How tall and how long is the Wall in Game of Thrones?
The Wall is said to stand roughly 700 feet high and run about 300 miles — a hundred leagues — from the Bay of Ice in the west to the Bay of Seals in the east. Its top is broad enough for a dozen mounted knights to ride abreast.
Who built the Wall?
Legend credits Brandon the Builder with raising the Wall some eight thousand years ago, at the end of the Long Night. The songs say he was helped by giants, who lifted the great blocks of ice, and by the children of the forest, who wove spells into it — though the maesters treat all of this as unverifiable legend.
How many castles are on the Wall, and how many are manned?
Nineteen castles were built along the Wall in the height of the Night's Watch. By the time of the novels, with the order reduced to fewer than a thousand men, only three are still garrisoned: Castle Black, Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, and the Shadow Tower.
What is the magic of the Wall?
The Wall is said to be more than ice — warded by spells laid at its making so that the Others and the dead cannot pass while it stands. At the abandoned Nightfort lies the Black Gate, a weirwood door that opens only for a sworn brother of the Night's Watch who speaks the words of the oath.