The Wall
The Wall closes off the north of the Seven Kingdoms. It is ice, seven hundred feet high and in places near nine hundred, and it runs three hundred miles from shore to shore. For much of its length the lower part is built into the hills themselves. At the top it is wide enough for a dozen riders abreast, and it is thicker at the foot.
Brandon the Builder raised it after the Long Night, the tales say, with the help of giants and of the children of the forest, and the North believes spells were worked into the ice so that the Others cannot pass. It is more than eight thousand years old. In summer it weeps, and the meltwater runs down its face.
Nineteen castles were built along it. As the story opens the Night’s Watch mans three: the Shadow Tower in the west by the mountains, Castle Black in the middle where the kingsroad ends, and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea, where the ice runs down into the Bay of Seals. The rest stand empty in the cold.
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Brandon the Builder
The founder of House Stark in the Age of Heroes, said to have raised Winterfell and the Wall with giants’ help.
The Night’s Watch
The sworn brotherhood in black that has held the Wall since the Long Night, now fewer than a thousand men.
Castle Black
Seat of the Night’s Watch, a castle with no curtain wall, its towers backed against the ice where the kingsroad ends.
The Long Night
A winter that lasted a generation, some eight thousand years ago, when the Others came out of the dark.
In the journey: The Wall