Winterfell
House Stark
The great grey seat of the Starks, its walls warmed by hot springs, its dead sleeping in the crypts below.
Enter the castleFrom the hot springs of Winterfell to the melted towers of Harrenhal, these are the great seats and grim strongholds of Westeros — who raised them, what they hide, and the wars that broke upon their walls. The stones are the singers'; the accounts are the chronicle's own.
House Stark
The great grey seat of the Starks, its walls warmed by hot springs, its dead sleeping in the crypts below.
Enter the castleHouse Baratheon
The pale red fortress on Aegon's High Hill, where the Iron Throne sits amid a warren of dungeons and secret ways.
Enter the castleHouse Lannister
Not a castle raised but a mountain hollowed — a stronghold of gold that has never once fallen.
Enter the castleHouse Arryn
Seven slim white towers on the shoulder of a mountain, so high the clouds break beneath them.
Enter the castleHouse Baratheon
One vast drum-tower behind one unbroken wall, against which the sea has broken in vain for thousands of years.
Enter the castleHouse Tyrell
A castle of gardens rather than dread, three rings of white walls set amid golden roses and briar mazes.
Enter the castleHouse Martell
The old seat of the Dornish princes, a sun-baked sprawl of towers ringed by a teeming shadow city.
Enter the castleHouse Greyjoy
A castle broken across sea-stacks and a dying headland, its towers linked by swaying rope bridges above the surf.
Enter the castleHouse Tully
A triangular castle wedged between two rivers, able to make itself an island at the turn of a wheel.
Enter the castleHouse Targaryen
The dragonlords' island fortress, its black stone worked into dragons and gargoyles by arts now lost.
Enter the castleHouse Whent
The vast, cursed, half-melted seat that Harren built to be impregnable, and that a dragon unmade in a night.
Enter the castleHouse Frey
Two matched towers on either bank of the Green Fork, joined by the only bridge for a hundred leagues — and a toll.
Enter the castleHouse Bolton
The grim northern seat of the Boltons, whose dungeons are hung, they say, with the skins of their enemies.
Enter the castleHeld by the Kings of the North
The crumbling First Men fortress that bars the causeway — the North's ancient shield against the south.
Enter the castleHarrenhal is the largest castle in the Seven Kingdoms, built on a colossal scale by Harren the Black — though its towers were half-melted by dragonfire the day it was finished. Casterly Rock, a whole hill hollowed into a fortress, is greater still in sheer bulk but is carved rather than built.
Several great seats are famed as unconquered: Casterly Rock has never fallen, Storm's End has never been taken by storm or siege, and the Eyrie has never been carried by assault. Moat Cailin, though a ruin, has never been taken from the south.
The seat of House Stark is Winterfell, an ancient walled castle in the North warmed by natural hot springs, with a weirwood godswood and the crypts of the Kings of Winter below. The Starks have held it for as long as records reach.
The Iron Throne stands in the Red Keep, the fortress crowning Aegon's High Hill in King's Landing. Begun by Aegon the Conqueror and finished by Maegor the Cruel, it is the seat of whoever rules the Seven Kingdoms.