Who decided where to build the wall?

[Frey Kings]

Would’ve been smarter to move it up to incorporate some of the natural resources south of the wall and leave the really uninhabitable lands alone.

[TMIFairy]

Some dude named Brandon picked the place.

[Frey Kings]

Why**** the location? 

Too late to change the thread title, oh well

[elder brother jonothor dar]

The wall creates the uninhabited lands north due to the watch chasing the wildlings away and south due to the threat of raids and no lord to keep the smallfoke in situ

[Dorian Martell's son]

On 11/6/2017 at 0:56 PM, Freys Injustice said:

Would’ve been smarter to move it up to incorporate some of the natural resources south of the wall and leave the really uninhabitable lands alone.

You should email the author and inform him of his mistake 

[Bobity.]

 

Here is Bran’s recounts of the Nightfort: "Twice as old as Castle Black," Bran said, remembering. "It was the first castle on the Wall, and the largest." - A Storm of Swords - Bran IV

My theory is that the Nightfort predates the Wall, and that the Wall was built east and west from there.  How else could one castle be twice as old than another? 

[cpg2016]

9 hours ago, Bobity. said:

 How else could one castle be twice as old than another? 

By being built twice as long before.

[cpg2016]

On 11/7/2017 at 4:08 AM, elder brother jonothor dar said:

The wall creates the uninhabited lands north due to the watch chasing the wildlings away and south due to the threat of raids and no lord to keep the smallfoke in situ

This.  I believe this is explicitly pointed out in the text; as the Watch loses strength, it loses the ability and the focus to protect it's lands, so the peasants bail and go south where the lords can protect them and they are that much further from raids.

[Bobity.]

10 hours ago, cpg2016 said:

By being built twice as long before.

Yet an Age of Heroes character was placed at the Nightfort, the Age of Heroes being before the Long Night and the construction of the Wall.

“The Nightfort had figured in some of Old Nan’s scariest stories…where blind Symeon Star-Eyes had seen the hellhounds fighting.” - Bran lV, A Storm of Swords

When it comes to Northern history, Old Nan's credibility is strong.

[Tygett Lannister]

White Walkers did.

[cpg2016]

On 11/9/2017 at 10:08 AM, Bobity. said:

Yet an Age of Heroes character was placed at the Nightfort, the Age of Heroes being before the Long Night and the construction of the Wall.

“The Nightfort had figured in some of Old Nan’s scariest stories…where blind Symeon Star-Eyes had seen the hellhounds fighting.” - Bran lV, A Storm of Swords

When it comes to Northern history, Old Nan's credibility is strong.

 

Right, but Symeon Star-Eyes is also described as a knight, despite the fact that knighthood only came to Westeros with the Andals, thousands of years after the Wall was built.

When it comes to Northern history, Old Nan's credibility in relating themes is strong; in details, not so much.  Kind of like how all oral history is more about substance than detail.

[Walda]

On 10/11/2017 at 6:52 PM, Tygett Lannister said:

White Walkers did.

Yeah, I think the enemy they built it against might have been a consideration, as well as the lay of the land, and other engineering considerations. And that it wasn't so much about keeping exploitable resources south of the wall.

I'm not sure Bran the Builder would even have valued the forest as you do @Freys Injustice. Remember it was built in an age when the wolfswood was huge and on this side of the wall.

In the real medieval, when there were forests everywhere, they were regarded as an inexhaustible resource. Not just inexhaustible, but belonging to the Lord.

And just as Norman England defined the forest legally as the property of the king, stealing venison being punishable by death, grazing domesticated animals on the venison's graze costing the offender their right hand, in Westeros the wood is the legal property of the lord, with similar strict penalties and similarly used by outlaws escaping the Kings Justice as a refuge. 

So there were dangers in even talking of a forest as a resource, if you were not a lord. And a lord that was attempting to exploit a forest that was not his, would be effectively starting a war, against a foreign king or his own, depending on the forest he was attempting to exploit for resources.

Geographically, on the south-western side of the wall, the wolfswood gives out to the flint hills, where people survive by grazing mostly, because the land is unsuitable for crops. On the south-eastern side, there is the natural boundary of the Lonley Hills and the Last river before the Last Hearth.

Brandon the builder saw the necessity of clearing the forest between the lands of the Umbers and Karstarks and the wall, in order to keep it strategically viable. Giving the incomes of that land to the 'neutral' Night's Watch to support themselves with,  as their payment for the onerous duty of keeping it clear and orderly, seems to have been taken as a palatable alternative to a levy or tax, by the lords whose lands bordered and might even have been appropriated by the gift, which strongly hints that it wasn't really that highly valued as a resource.

The peoples north of the Last Hearth are socialised in clans rather than feudal structures, and eke out a subsistence in small isolated communities. On the other side of the wall, it is much the same, but the communities are smaller and more isolated, the subsistence even harder to eke out, even in good times.  Clan and tribal structures hint that they were at least semi-nomadic, expanding into Northern fields in the summer, and retreating from them in the winter.

So Brandon the Builder might not have regarded the Haunted Forest as a resource that was his for the taking, nor felt much pressure to exploit it. It might in fact have been regarded more as a wasteland - an area of marginal fertility, which would force upon any lord who attempted to exploit it more expense in draining swamps and cutting out meadows and towns than it would return with it's infertile soil, uncertain crops and difficult trading conditions. That he gave a huge swathe of it to the Night's Watch to manage, apparently unopposed by his king and the neighbouring lords, tends to support it.

The Watch has been in the habit of clearing the Haunted Forest immediately north of the wall for centuries:

Quote

The Night’s Watch permitted the forest to come no closer than half a mile of the north face of the Wall. The thickets of ironwood and sentinel and oak that had once grown there had been harvested centuries ago, to create a broad swath of open ground through which no enemy could hope to pass unseen.

(AGoT, Ch.21 Tyrion III)

and note the name - the Haunted Forest. GRRM hasn't done much with it other than note the name yet. Characters travel though it, much the same as any other woodland, with the occasional tingle in their spine, often shrugged off as imaginary:

Quote

He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now, and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the haunted forest had no more terrors for him.
Until tonight.

(AGoT, Prologue)

Quote

the dark trees looming beyond the stretch of open ground, like a second wall built parallel to the first, a wall of night. Few axes had ever swung in that black wood, where even the moonlight could not penetrate the ancient tangle of root and thorn and grasping limb. Out there the trees grew huge, and the rangers said they seemed to brood and knew not men.

(AGoT, Ch.21 Tyrion III)

Quote

Perhaps it was all in the knowing. They had ridden past the end of the world; somehow that changed everything. Every shadow seemed darker, every sound more ominous. The trees pressed close and shut out the light of the setting sun. A thin crust of snow cracked beneath the hooves of their horses, with a sound like breaking bones. When the wind set the leaves to rustling, it was like a chilly finger tracing a path up Jon’s spine. The Wall was at their backs, and only the gods knew what lay ahead.

(AGoT, Ch.48 Jon VI)

But our points of view soon get the better of it:

Quote

A gust of wind sent wet leaves flapping round them like a flock of dead birds.The haunted forest, Jon thought ruefully. The drowned forest, more like it. (ACoK, Ch.23 Jon III)

Quote

Seven hundred feet up, Jon Snow stood looking down upon the haunted forest. A north wind swirled through the trees below, sending thin white plumes of snow crystals flying from the highest branches, like icy banners. Elsewise nothing moved. Not a sign of life. That was not entirely reassuring. It was not the living that he feared. Even so …

(ADwD,Ch.35 Jon VII)

Admittedly, most of our points of view on the wall are unusually fearless: Tyrion, Jon, and Melisandre. But there is also Sam, who is unusually fearful, although not at all of the haunted forest. Once he is actually in it, rather than facing the thought of going into it, he doesn't feel it at all the way Jon and Tyrion do.

In later books, while it is still accompanied by 'forboding', 'brooding silence', and 'darkness', the terror of the Haunted Forest has become the wights and the white walkers, rather than any intrinsic horror in the wood itself.

Quote

Gilly would be safe at Horn Hill, with all the width of Westeros between her and the horrors she had known in the haunted forest.

(AFfC, Ch.15 Samwell II)

That would be Chekov's gun loaded, if I am not mistaken.

The early mentions of the forest 'like a second wall', untouched by axes, with a godwood grove of faces a day's ride from Castle Black, hints at the pact that ended the dawn age and ushered in the age of heroes - the age of Bran the Builder. I'm wondering if the thick lines of the trees might in fact have been an earlier wall, built by the Children of the Forest or the trees themselves, guarding the realms of men before the wall was built, marking a boundary that might or might not have been guarded on the south side by the Night Fort and perhaps more transitory forts or villages of first men, now long gone, perhaps swallowed by  the forest on the northern side, or cleared by the Night's Watch when they were granted the Gift.

In the pact we are told of, the forest had been granted the Children of the Forest, and the open lands to men. Although that pact was signed in the God's Eye, which seems to hint that back then, before the Andal invasion, the boundary between the forest and the open lands was in fact the Trident. Still, I think Brandon the Builder knew better than to touch a tree in the Haunted Forest with steel.

In the present times, it seems they don't. The bans on providing Wildlings north of the wall with steel axes that the Night's Watch policed in Davos' boyhood (ASoS, Ch.54 Davos V) seem to have relaxed, or become unenforcible due to the lack of manpower on the wall. Or are openly flouted, like when Jeor Mormont presented Craster with Answered Prayer. Waymar Royce draws his sword to hack through the undergrowth. And as for King Stannis:

Quote

The queen’s men had made it from the trees of the haunted forest, from saplings and supple branches, pine boughs sticky with sap, and the bone-white fingers of the weirwoods. They’d bent them and twisted them around and through each other to weave a wooden lattice, then hung it high above a deep pit filled with logs, leaves, and kindling.

 (ADwD, Ch.10 Jon III)

Quote

When they emerged north of the Wall, through a thick door made of freshly hewn green wood, the wildling princess paused for a moment to gaze out across the snow-covered field where King Stannis had won his battle. Beyond, the haunted forest waited, dark and silent.

(ADwD, Ch.39 Jon VIII)

and that would be Chekhov's gun locked.

[Tygett Lannister]

@Walda I just dont think people could build such structure after all White Walkers have weapons made of Ice not hoomans.

 

[Walda]

17 hours ago, Tygett Lannister said:

@Walda I just dont think people could build such structure after all White Walkers have weapons made of Ice not hoomans.

 

Ok, so why did the white walkers choose that location for their waill?

[Tygett Lannister]

3 hours ago, Walda said:

Ok, so why did the white walkers choose that location for their waill?

It was narrow?

[The Commentator]

On 11/6/2017 at 3:56 PM, Freys Injustice said:

Would’ve been smarter to move it up to incorporate some of the natural resources south of the wall and leave the really uninhabitable lands alone.

Most likely dictated by the terrain and the geography of the land.  Politically, nobody wants that $*%# on their land.  Far enough north but still within the appropriate choke point from the sea in the west to the sea in the east.  

[The Commentator]

5 hours ago, Walda said:

Ok, so why did the white walkers choose that location for their waill?

No man's land?  Maybe there was a treaty and that area became the DMZ.  

[Whitering]

8 minutes ago, Widowmaker 811 said:

Most likely dictated by the terrain and the geography of the land.  Politically, nobody wants that $*%# on their land.  Far enough north but still within the appropriate choke point from the sea in the west to the sea in the east.  

This. It's kind of at the best point from a natural geography standpoint. In any case, I am pretty sure the Children picked the place