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Understanding traveling in GoT book


Beckie O'Beckie

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Hi,

I've watched all of season 1. I am now reading Game of Thrones and watching season 2. I would like to better understanding how Catelyn was able to sail to King's Landing before Eddard arrived via horseback. Specifically, how long had Eddard been gone before Catelyn left? How far did Eddard and King travel per day? How many days did Catelyn travel by horse and then by sea to get to King's Landing? How many days to the Wall? I've looked through this forum, GRRM's site and HBO.com, but I haven't found a way to get the exact answers to these and other questions I have. Can anyone help me please?

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In the book, Catelyn actually took a ship for much of the way (from the White Harbor to King's Landing) which is why she arrived first. Also, King Robert's caravan was very slow, with all the wagons and the children and the queen, not to mention the constant hunts they went on along the way.

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Thanks for responding, but I'm interested in the actual time of travel involved. I know she sailed there and I know the wheelhouse is slow, I know they stopped very often and that eventually Eddard rode ahead of the group. My question is has anyone actually tried to put some sort of timetable to all of this.

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Thanks for responding, but I'm interested in the actual time of travel involved. I know she sailed there and I know the wheelhouse is slow, I know they stopped very often and that eventually Eddard rode ahead of the group. My question is has anyone actually tried to put some sort of timetable to all of this.

I think Martin leaves things deliberatley vague, so he doesn't have to be bogged down with traveling times i.e stating in one part of the book that it takes X days to get from point A to point B and that then impacting a later plot point when someone needs to go from A to B in less than X days. There are timelines out there but once you try and sort things out like that it becomes clear that the traveling distances are a bit iffy, and that the chronology of the books is often a bit muddled.

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I think protar has the right idea here. Especially when you get to a clash of kings where a lot of characters are doing a lot of traveling...specific time frames could get very messy.

The only thing I can think of is that Martin has vaguely described distances from place to place in leagues/miles, and I think it was stated early on in AGOT that it took king Robert several months to get from kings landing to winterfell, but that's about it as far as I know.

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Catelyn sailed part of the way, as ckal says, which is a lot faster than slogging along the road.

Lord Mountain Goat has an animated timeline kicking around somewhere which is linked to in his .sig, and Errant Bard (I think - I often get this one wrong) put together a nice date-by-date timeline as well. You might want to hold off on looking at those, as there are spoilers.

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  • 3 weeks later...

(Peeking out from my regular lurk mode.) I have also recently been wondering about distances in Westeros and found this archived Forum thread titled “Distances” (archived, but with a distance chart that its poster is very modest about constructing...):

My questions about distances arose because of a possible typo in my edition of the 4-book eBundle, from ASOS, Jon I, when Mance is singing about the Dornishman's wife, and Jon thinks about how strange it is to hear the song "beyond the Wall, ten thousand leagues from the red mountains and warm winds of Dorne."

Ten thousand leagues would be about 30,000 miles...maybe is was meant to be "one thousand" leagues...I think I've resolved it in my mind as a typo, but in the process of looking it up in the archives, I have stumbled upon some interesting threads, which have lead me on a wonderful "bright shiny object" reading expedition. Back to lurk mode.

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Okay, I can see that upon rereading. thx, Ran. You're an indispensible font of info from what I've read on the Forums.

"Ten thousand leagues" is like a kid complaining that something is a million miles away -- it's a purposeful exaggeration.

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  • 1 month later...

If still interested, at some point there is a ship sailing for eastwatch by the sea going south. We're told that it took about ten days from eastwatch to the island of Skagos. Check out a map and it'll give a general idea of time/distances. Keep in mind travelling by ship is faster.

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  • 3 years later...

o.k. Travel in westeros is very vague. A few things of this nature are stated. It was stated that the wall


was 100 leagues long. And a league is 3 miles.So the wall is 300 miles long. Now as far as travel time,


I go by common distances. The average human can walk 3 miles in an hour. So being on horseback,


and traveling 8 hrs a day,depending how many are traveling together,24-30 miles a day.And that would


be on flat ground,not taking terrain into consideration. Trying to figure out traveling distances is like


trying to figure out timelines, its a guessing game at best.


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  • 5 weeks later...

o.k. Travel in westeros is very vague. A few things of this nature are stated.  It was stated that the wall

was 100 leagues long. And a league is 3 miles.So the wall is 300 miles long. Now as far as travel time,

I go by common distances. The average human can walk 3 miles in an hour. So being on horseback,

and traveling 8 hrs a day,depending how many are traveling together,24-30 miles a day.And that would

be on flat ground,not taking terrain into consideration. Trying to figure out traveling distances is like

trying to figure out timelines, its a guessing game at best.

 

 

It is a guessing game at best, but using this information, you could calculate the length of Westeros (using one of the many estimated maps out there) and then divide it up into days able to travel, adding on or subtracting as you see fit for different terrain.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thanks for responding, but I'm interested in the actual time of travel involved. I know she sailed there and I know the wheelhouse is slow, I know they stopped very often and that eventually Eddard rode ahead of the group. My question is has anyone actually tried to put some sort of timetable to all of this.


In the show, when the royal party arrives in Winterfell and Robert wants to go down to the crypts, Cersei says they've been traveling for a month. So assuming they went from Winterfell to KL at roughly the same pace, we can assume Catelyn's overall journey may have taken less than four weeks.
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In the books it's more than a month. It takes 12 days to cross the Neck. It takes a fortnight from the Trident-Darry to KL. So, that alone is 26 days, not counting the travel from Twins to Trident, or from WF to Moat Cailin. The app says it's 8 days from WF to the Barowlands (edge of it), so from WF to Moat Cailin would be 16 days. Distance from Twins to Trident looks equal to the distance from Trident to KL, so that's another fortnight. That all tallies up to 56 days, aka about 2 moons. It actually should be 3 months.

 

Catelyn needs to make an overland voyage from WF to White Harbor, which is the same distance as from WF to Moat Cailin. So that's 16 days. Then she gets a fast ship from White Harbor to KL. A galley can do a distance at 7 knots (8 mph), but travels 24/7, unlike overland travel. By the estimated distances between White Harbor and KL, she could travel it by boat in 11 days. So, she only needs 27 days of travel. But she's not as conditioned (despite galloping and you can't galop for 16 days on end anyway), still you'd expect her to travel as fast as a huge royal carriage that's broken all the time and needs its axles fixed. She had some counterwind on the way to KL at sea, and Bran sees her on the ship at the Bite (near White Harbor) while Ned's at the Trident with Sansa crying over Lady. Cat makes the decision to leave for KL on the 12th day after Ned left (when he's somewhere in the Barrowlands). So either it took her about a month to get from WF to White Harbor, or she didn't leave on the 13th day yet. But it seems that 11-12 days sea voyage was all that was indeed necessary from White Harbor to KL.

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  • 4 months later...
On 6/10/2012 at 9:32 AM, AryaPrevails said:

Ok, so the comments in this blog are great and I apologize if this has all been discussed before. But the writer of this blog scales Westeros and Essos comparably to the size of the United States going off a scale based on the 300 mile Wall. In theory this makes sense, and if his scaling is correct, does that add up to a realistic time frame of what it would take to traverse Westeros by horseback, in huge caravans. It's said it took a month for Robert's Caravan to travel from King's Landing to Winterfell. And it's a 3 weeks ride from Winterfell to the Wall. How fast would you have to travel to make that scale in that amount of time?

Stumbled upon an excellent blog by Adam Whitehead. He recently posted this:

 

http://thewertzone.blogspot.ca/2012/06/size-of-westeros-compared-to-usa.html

 

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On 13-4-2012 at 6:24 PM, Beckie O'Beckie said:

Thanks for responding, but I'm interested in the actual time of travel involved. I know she sailed there and I know the wheelhouse is slow, I know they stopped very often and that eventually Eddard rode ahead of the group. My question is has anyone actually tried to put some sort of timetable to all of this.

We can't say the exact time that passed, of course, but we do know a few things:

- Crossing the Neck took 12 days

- From the Trident (castle Darry) to  King's Landing took a fortnight to travel

- Reaching the Barrowlands from Winterfel takes about 8 days

 

Now take a look at the maps. I personally always use The Lands of Ice and Fire, the map of Westeros. Comparing the distances that we know (12 days for the Neck, a fortnight for Trident to KL) to the distances left vague and undescribed, you can estimate that the distance not decribed is slightly more than the distance described, meaning that, the best estimation that we can make, is that the travelling time took about 2 months.. The twelve and fourteen days described times two, plus a little extra because the undescribed distance is slighly longer.

Of course, that doesn't cover the days spent not travelling. The last fortnight was without stops, but during the part of the journey before, there were apparently regular stops for hunting. We've seen two of such days described. In addition, the searching for Arya took 4 days, and those count as well. 

 

In total, based on all of this above, I'd estimate the time it took Ned some 2,5 months, give or take. 

I'd refer you to this thread, in addition to all the links given above. There are, of course, spoilers, so I wouldn't look at it until you've at least finished the first book. It is clearly marked which entry is derived from which book, but even so, don't scroll down too quickly and accidentally read something you didn't want to read yet.

 

 

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