The Season 6 premiere of HBO's "Game of Thrones" is just a month away, but new reports claim that filming has been delayed due to a rockslide. The Castle Black set at Northern Ireland was recently threatened by a rockslide.
Fans of the show and books know that Castle Black is the home of the Knight's Watch. According to Entertainment Weekly, the Castle Black scenes are filmed at Magheramorne Quarry in Northern Ireland. There, the Game of Thrones production set up a functional castle with an icy wall, which is known as The Wall in the series. The report states that the region usually gets heavy rain, and most of the shots there for Season 6 were taken during an "extremely cold winter downpour."
However, during the filming, the crew noticed small pebbles coming down from the quarry, which eventually became larger stones, so they decided to pack up. Nobody was reportedly affected by the rockslide, except the HBO show's schedule. Fortunately though, according to Winter is Coming, executive producer Bernie Caulfield and producer Chris Newman managed to sort out the setback in the schedule.
"[W]e got everything we needed in that quarry after it was seismically shored up and netted and proper protection measures were taken. It actually worked out for the best - some of the stuff we were shooting in that location benefited from the addition prep time the rockslide gave us," said showrunner Dan Weiss.
Located in County Antrim, North Ireland, Megheramorne is a hamlet and is home to only 75 people, according to the 2001 Census. There's a nearby limestone quarry there owned by Lafarge, formerly known as Blue Circle. The Megheramorne Quarry, meanwhile, is abandoned, and is now known as one of the filming locations of "Game of Thrones." George R.R. Martin, the author of the book series "A Song of Ice and Fire" on which the TV show is based, once described the place, saying, "It's a pretty spectacular, yet miserable location. It is wet and rainy, and the mud is thick. I visited there; 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."
