Barrowton

A wooden town raised around the Great Barrow of the First King, ruled by House Dustin.

The fuller tale

Barrowton is a wooden town in the treeless barrowlands, built around and beneath the Great Barrow — a hill said to hold the First King of the First Men, so old that the Dustins who rule here claim descent from the Barrow Kings who warred with Winterfell for a thousand years before the wolves won. The town is prosperous, orderly and strange: streets laid out in the shadow of a grave, ruled from a hall whose lady never remarried and never forgave.

Barbrey Dustin is Barrowton’s presiding spirit — widowed by Ned Stark’s rebellion, embittered that her lord’s bones never came home from Dorne while a war was fought to bring back Lyanna’s, and honest about her grudges the way only northerners are. In the later war Barrowton becomes the Boltons’ staging ground, its hall thick with lords whose smiles Roose cannot read; the town is the books’ great study in how much of the North’s loyalty was only ever leased, and to whom the interest was owed.

The fallen of this place — if any, they are named here. Spoilers.

No death the chronicle records has come to this ground — or none the maesters have set down.