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  ====The Wall====
  The Wall in the ''Ice and Fire'' series was inspired by Hadrian's Wall in the North of England.
  The Wall is a huge structure of stone, ice, and magic on the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms. It is home to the Night's Watch, a brotherhood sworn to protect the realms of men from the threats beyond the Wall. 
  The Wall was inspired by Martin's visit to Hadrian's Wall, in the North of England close to the border with Scotland. Looking out over the hills, Martin wondered what a Roman centurion from the Mediterranean would feel, not knowing what threats might come from the north. This experience was so profound that a decade later, in 1991, he wanted to "write a story about the people guarding the end of the world", and ultimately "the things that come out of the fictional north are a good deal more terrifying than Scotsmen or Picts". 
  Martin adjusted the size, length, and magical nature of the Wall for genre demands; Jon Snow's chapters describe it as approximately  long and  high in general, rising up to a perceived  in spots due to huge foundation blocks. The top is wide enough for a dozen mounted knights to ride abreast (approximately 30 ft or 10 m), while the base is so thick that the Wall's gates are more like tunnels through the ice.
  The novels' legends claim that the First Men, or more specifically Brandon the Builder with the possible help of children of the forest and giants, constructed the Wall some 8,000 years before the events of the series.
  The Wall has since been maintained by the Night's Watch to guard the realms of men against the threats from beyond, originally the Others, and later against wildling raids. 
  A strip of land known as "the Gift", now stretching 50 leagues (about ) south of the wall, was given to them in perpetuity thousands of years ago for cultivation. In ''A Game of Thrones'', out of the nineteen castles built along the wall, only three are still manned: Castle Black with 600 men, and the Shadow Tower and Eastwatch-by-the-Sea with 200 men each. Parts of Castle Black have fallen into ruin.
  The TV series' Castle Black and the Wall were filmed in the abandoned Magheramorne Quarry near Belfast, Northern Ireland, whereas the scenes shot atop the wall were filmed inside Paint Hall Studios. The composite set (with both exteriors and interiors) consisted of a large section of Castle Black including the courtyard, the ravenry, the mess hall, and the barracks, and used the stone wall of the quarry as the basis for the ice wall that protects Westeros from the dangers that dwell beyond. They also made a functional elevator to lift the rangers to the top of the Wall. A castle with real rooms and a working elevator were built near a cliff  high. "Working construction lifts were discovered at a nearby work site and rise 18 feet; CGI fills in the rest to make the wall appear 700 feet high." The area around the elevator was painted white to make it look like ice. Martin was surprised by the height and thought: "Oh I may have made the wall too big!" Martin observed: "It's a pretty spectacular, yet miserable location. It is wet and rainy, and the mud is thick....it really gets the actors in the mood of being at the end of the world in all of this cold and damp and chill."