The Neck

The great bog that pinches Westeros to a narrow, fevered waist ÔÇö quicksands, lizard-lions and crannogmen who move through the marsh like ghosts. The causeway through it can be held by a handful against a host, which is why every southern king who marched on the North regretted it at Moat Cailin.

The fuller tale

The Neck is the NorthÔÇÖs moat and the continentÔÇÖs bottleneck ÔÇö a vast fevered swamp where Westeros pinches to its narrowest waist, all quicksands, drowned forest and lizard-lions, crossed by a single raised causeway that an army must walk in single file. The crannogmen live in it as no one else could, in reed-thatched halls on floating islands, hunting with poisoned arrows and appearing and vanishing like the marshÔÇÖs own weather; their lords, the Reeds of Greywater Watch, rule from a castle that moves, which no raven has ever found twice.

The old tales say the children of the forest tried to break Westeros in two here, calling down the hammer of the waters to drown the Neck as they had the Arm of Dorne ÔÇö and half succeeded, leaving the swamp as the scar. Strategically the Neck has decided the NorthÔÇÖs whole history: every southern host must thread it under Moat CailinÔÇÖs towers with crannogmen in the reeds, which is why the North was never conquered from without. The storyÔÇÖs keeper of the Neck, Howland Reed, is also the keeper of its deepest secret ÔÇö the one man living who knows what happened at the tower where Ned Stark made his promise.

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

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