Cider Hall

The apple-sigiled Fossoways' seat at the meeting of the Mander and the Cockleswhent — soon to be two houses, red apples and green, over a quarrel born at Ashford Meadow.

The fuller tale

Cider Hall sits where the Mander meets the Cockleswhent, seat of a Fossoway branch prosperous enough to name a castle for its orchards, and it enters the tale as the origin point of a joke the wider saga never lets die. At Ashford Meadow, Ser Steffon Fossoway — of the family’s other branch — argues loudly that an unproven hedge knight has no business in a tourney meant for men of quality; a Fossoway of Cider Hall takes the opposite view, and vouches for Dunk when it costs something to do so. The quarrel outlives the tourney and splits the house cleanly down the middle, red apple against green, a division the family never quite mends and the rest of Westeros never quite lets them forget.

Cider Hall itself is unremarkable as castles go — a comfortable holding among the orchards of the upper Mander, more concerned with cider presses than politics — which is precisely what makes its accidental role in the Fossoway split so telling. It took one hedge knight, one insult, and one moment of decency at a tourney gate to hand a minor Reach house a permanent identity crisis; the red apple and the green apple both still fly, generations on, arguing without ever quite remembering that the argument began here.

In the first season

Ser Steffon Fossoway rides to Ashford to make his name; his cousin Raymun rides with him to carry his shield. Only one of them comes home fit to be called a knight.

Born here

Souls the story brings here

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.