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Real JourneysApproximate

Patrick Leigh Fermor: On Foot to Constantinople

In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road. The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.

10 locations6/10 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Wild: Mojave to the Bridge of the Gods

In June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film. This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.

7 locations6/7 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Hillary and Tenzing: The Road to Everest, 1953

At 11:30 a.m. on 29 May 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mount Everest, the first people confirmed to have done so. They were part of a British expedition led by Colonel John Hunt, which in the end amounted to over four hundred men, including twenty Sherpa guides and 362 porters. The route follows that expedition from winter training in Wales through Kathmandu, Thyangboche, Base Camp, the Khumbu Icefall, the Western Cwm and the South Col to the summit, then to the telegraph runner's stop at Namche Bazaar. Pins above Base Camp mark the terrain, not the exact camps of 1953.

9 locations4/9 visitable

BooksSpeculative

Crime and Punishment: Raskolnikov's St Petersburg

On an exceptionally hot July evening a student leaves a garret "more like a cupboard than a room" and counts exactly 730 steps to a pawnbroker's door. Dostoevsky's novel plays out in the Hay Market slums, on the canal and on the bridges of the Neva, and he hid many addresses behind initials such as "S. Place" and "K. bridge". This route follows Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov from the garret to the police office. The garret, the pawnbroker's house and the police office are researchers' identifications rather than facts, and are marked as such.

7 locations5/7 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Amundsen and Scott: The Race to the South Pole

In 1910 two expeditions set out for the bottom of the world. Roald Amundsen's Norwegians, masters of skis and sled dogs, reached the South Pole on 14 December 1911. Robert Falcon Scott's party arrived on 17 January 1912, 34 days later, to find a Norwegian tent already standing. Amundsen sent his news from Hobart; Scott's party of five died on the return journey. The route follows both men from Cardiff and Madeira to their bases, up their two glaciers, to the Pole and to the endings: Amundsen's cables from Hobart and Scott's last camp. Antarctic pins mark glaciers and bays, not camps, and the ice has moved since.

10 locations1/10 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Captain Cook's First Voyage: Round the World in the Endeavour

On 26 August 1768 the Endeavour left Plymouth with 94 people aboard, bound for Tahiti to watch Venus cross the Sun. Almost three years later she anchored off the Kent coast again, having reached New Zealand and the east coast of Australia, and with many of her people lost to disease on the way home. The route follows James Cook's own journal and modern accounts through ten stops, from the anchorage at Plymouth to the Great Barrier Reef and Batavia. Dates follow modern accounts, which sometimes differ by a day from the journal.

10 locations7/10 visitable

Real JourneysApproximate

Lewis and Clark: Up the Missouri to the Pacific

In May 1804 William Clark and about 30 others left a winter camp on the Mississippi and turned up the Missouri, the first stage of an expedition sent to cross the newly acquired western part of the country. Captains Meriwether Lewis and Clark kept journals, and many of their entries are quoted here in their own spelling. The route follows them from Camp Dubois past a sergeant's grave, a tense standoff with the Teton Sioux, a winter at Fort Mandan, the Great Falls, the Continental Divide and the snowbound Lolo Trail to the Pacific, then home by way of Clark's signature on Pompeys Pillar. Where a camp is lost to the river or to time, the pin marks the nearest place you can visit.

11 locations10/11 visitable

Real JourneysSpeculative

Marco Polo: From Venice to the Great Khan and Back

In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle for the court of Kublai Khan and did not come home for 24 years. Years later, in a Genoese prison, he dictated what he had seen to a fellow inmate, and The Travels of Marco Polo was the result. The route follows the book from Venice and Acre to the Persian Gulf, across the Pamir highlands and the desert to Kublai's summer and winter capitals, south to Hangzhou and the port of Zayton, and home again. Some of the roads are reconstructed by scholars, and Polo sometimes exaggerates, so each stop notes where the evidence is thin.

12 locations9/12 visitable

MoviesApproximate

The Talented Mr. Ripley: Ischia to Venice

Tom Ripley is paid $1,000 to travel to Italy and persuade Dickie Greenleaf to return to the United States. Claiming to be a former Princeton classmate, he slides into Dickie's life, and a friendship at the seaside turns into a trail of lies and killings. The route follows the film's order through Ischia and Procida, Anzio, Naples, Rome and Venice. Many places play other places: Ischia and Procida stand in for the fictional village of Mongibello, Anzio plays San Remo, and the "Roman" opera house is in Naples.

8 locations8/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Before Sunset: Paris in Real Time

Nine years after a night in Vienna, Jesse is on a book tour in Europe when Céline walks into his reading in a Paris bookshop. He has an hour before his flight, and they spend it wandering the city. Richard Linklater's 2004 film plays in real time: the story lasts about as long as the film, roughly eighty minutes. It was shot in 15 days across Paris, and its locations jump about more than the dialogue admits. This route follows the film's order from the Left Bank bookshop through the Marais and the east of the city to the Seine and a gated courtyard in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine.

7 locations6/7 visitable

GamesApproximate

Kingdom Come: Deliverance II — Kuttenberg and the Bohemian Paradise

Bohemia, 1403. Henry of Skalitz and Sir Hans Capon ride to Trosky Castle to find out which side Otto von Bergow is on, and the civil war between King Wenceslaus IV and King Sigismund drags them from the rocks of the Bohemian Paradise to the silver city of Kuttenberg, today Kutná Hora. The 2025 sequel by Warhorse Studios recreates its two big maps from real castles, villages and streets. The route follows the story from Trosky to the siege of Suchdol. The game's version of each place is a 1403 reconstruction, so look for the castle ruins and rebuilt keeps rather than the exact buildings Henry sees. The first game's story ends just before it, so this route picks up at Trosky.

7 locations5/7 visitable

MoviesSpeculative

Studio Ghibli: The Real Places Behind Eight Films

Studio Ghibli's worlds feel lived-in because Miyazaki went to look at real places: a Welsh mining museum for the village in Castle in the Sky, Visby for the town of Kiki's Delivery Service, the harbour of Tomonoura before Ponyo. Other links are only rumoured, and he has denied at least one, the town of Jiufen in Taiwan for Spirited Away. This route follows eight films in release order, from 1986 to 2008, and pairs each with the real place reported as its inspiration. Only some of these identifications come from Miyazaki himself, so every stop says whose claim it is, and none of them is a filming location.

8 locations8/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Twin Peaks: From the Falls to the Double R

Twin Peaks is set five miles from the Canadian border, but its exteriors come from the Snoqualmie Valley, all around 25–30 miles from Seattle. David Lynch and Mark Frost found the places they had written into the pilot in Snoqualmie, North Bend and Fall City. This route follows the series through five of them: the falls from the opening titles, the road with the welcome sign, the hotel, the sheriff's station and the diner. Most interiors were built on sets in a San Fernando Valley warehouse, so these stops are exteriors, and the Reinig Road pin marks the road, not one spot.

5 locations4/5 visitable

MythologySpeculative

Robin Hood: From Barnsdale to Kirklees

Robin Hood is known from medieval ballads, and the oldest of them are set as much in Yorkshire's Barnsdale and in Nottingham as in Sherwood. This route follows A Gest of Robyn Hode and its companions, from the Sorrowful Knight's first dinner in the greenwood to Robin's death at the priory. None of these places can be proved: every identification is a tradition, and the legend is not history. Each stop names the ballad that tells its episode and says how firmly the place is tied to it.

9 locations5/9 visitable

MythologySpeculative

King Arthur: From Merlin's Dragons to Avalon

King Arthur belongs to no single place. His story was built up by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Thomas Malory and many others, and this route follows it in the legend's own order: Merlin's dragons, Arthur's conception and coronation, his battles and court, the last fight, the sword in the water and Avalon. Every pin marks a real place that tradition has attached to an episode, not a site proven by history, and each stop says where the link is doubted.

9 locations5/9 visitable

BooksFictional

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Across Dartmoor

A cursed squire, a spectral hound and a moor that swallows ponies: Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, serialised in The Strand Magazine in 1901–02, is set largely on Dartmoor, and several of its places have real counterparts. The route runs from the grave that may have inspired the legend and the ten-thirty train from Paddington to the convict prison at Princetown, the mire, the tors and the Stapletons' house. Baskerville Hall and Merripit House exist only in the book, so their pins mark a stand-in or nothing at all.

7 locations5/7 visitable

BooksApproximate

The Count of Monte Cristo: From Marseille to Paris

A young sailor is arrested at his own engagement party, thrown into a prison island, escapes in a dead man's burial sack, finds a hidden treasure and comes back as a count to settle accounts. This route follows Dumas's novel in order, from the Marseille lookout to the island where it ends. Most of the stops can be visited; the island of Monte Cristo is a nature reserve with a years-long waiting list, and several scenes happen in places Dumas invented, so those pins mark the real landmark nearby.

9 locations6/9 visitable

BooksApproximate

The Three Musketeers: Meung, Paris and La Rochelle

In April 1625 an eighteen-year-old Gascon rides into the market town of Meung on a yellow pony, bound for Paris and the King's Musketeers. Dumas's novel follows D'Artagnan from that first quarrel through duels, a secret night in the Louvre, a bet made during a siege and a midnight ending on a river bank. The route runs from the Loire to Paris, on to La Rochelle and Portsmouth, and back to the banks of the Lys. The streets, squares and palaces are real; most inns, houses and bastions are Dumas's, so several pins mark a town or a street rather than a building.

8 locations4/8 visitable

GamesApproximate

Assassin's Creed III: The American Revolution

In 1754 a British gentleman, Haytham Kenway, kills a man at the opera in London and carries a stolen key to the American colonies. He is a Templar. His son, Connor, grows up to become the Assassin who hunts him across the American Revolution — through the Boston Massacre and the tea ships, the first shots at Lexington, Bunker Hill, Valley Forge, Monmouth and finally New York. Assassin's Creed III builds its America from real maps, and almost every stop can still be walked: the opera house in Covent Garden, the Old State House and Boston Harbor, the green at Lexington and the bridge at Concord, the Bunker Hill battlefield, the Valley Forge encampment, the Monmouth battlefield, and the Battery at the foot of Manhattan, where the war ends.

9 locations9/9 visitable

MoviesExact

Stranger Things: Hawkins in Georgia

Hawkins, Indiana, is the town where nothing ever happens — until a boy vanishes and a girl walks out of the woods. None of it is real Indiana. The show built Hawkins out of small-town Georgia: the square in Jackson, a shuttered psychiatric hospital near Atlanta, a dead shopping mall in Duluth. This route follows the real stand-ins, from the laboratory where the story begins to the quarry, the school, the Starcourt Mall, the mansion that became the Creel House, and the Vilnius prison that stood in for Kamchatka.

8 locations3/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Back to the Future: Hill Valley in Los Angeles

Hill Valley is fictional, but almost all of it is Los Angeles. The 1985 film sends Marty McFly thirty years back to a small California town, and the filmmakers built its square on a studio backlot and dressed real malls, schools, churches and houses around the city as Hill Valley. This route follows the story from the Twin Pines Mall car park in City of Industry through 1955 and back to the McFly home in Arleta. Each stop is a real place that played a piece of Hill Valley; the private homes are seen from the street only.

8 locations5/8 visitable

MoviesApproximate

Forrest Gump: Savannah to Monument Valley

A feather drifts down onto a bench in Savannah, and a man starts to talk. His life unrolls across half a century of American history, from an Alabama childhood to the jungles of Vietnam, the Lincoln Memorial, the Watergate and a bayou shrimp boat. This route follows the film in order, from the bench on Chippewa Square to the lighthouse in Maine and the desert where the running finally stops. It marks the real locations and the real stand-ins, since the fictional town of Greenbow and the Vietnam jungle were both played by South Carolina.

9 locations7/9 visitable

GamesApproximate

Forza Horizon 4: A Britain Road Trip

Forza Horizon 4, released on 2 October 2018, turns Great Britain into one giant racetrack: an open world with condensed representations of Edinburgh, the Scottish Highlands, the Lake District and the Cotswolds, where seasons change every week and Derwentwater freezes hard enough to drive across. Microsoft counted 24 million players by November 2020, and Polygon found the game world a theme-park version of England where everything has "the faint whiff of an idealised 1950s about it, a place of ordered pub gardens and rosebushes". This route drives the real Britain behind the game, north to south: Edinburgh's Old Town, Bamburgh Castle on its coastal crag, three Lake District stops at Derwentwater, Ambleside and Tarn Hows, and the honey-coloured village of Broadway in the Cotswolds. Every stop can be visited today.

6 locations6/6 visitable

BooksApproximate

Sherlock Holmes: Baker Street and the Canon

A chance meeting at the Criterion Bar sends an army doctor just back from Afghanistan to a laboratory at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where a stranger grips his hand and observes: "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive." Within days Dr Watson has moved into 221B Baker Street, the address where many of the stories begin, and off runs the canon: four novels and 56 short stories, all but one set between 1880 and 1914. This route walks Holmes's London in the order the stories appeared: the Criterion where Watson met Stamford, the hospital of the famous first deduction, the Baker Street rooms that did not exist when Doyle wrote and are now a museum, Scotland Yard's Victorian headquarters on the Embankment, a society church where a bride vanishes, a silent club on Pall Mall, and the Underground station where a body fell from a train roof.

7 locations7/7 visitable