Charlotte and Emily Brontë grew up in a parsonage on the edge of the Pennine moors, and the landscape of both novels still runs through the places they knew: a harsh school, a house with a famous library, a ruined farm on the heights.
The route starts at the Haworth parsonage, goes to the school behind Lowood, then up to the farms said to lie behind Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, and ends in Derbyshire at the hall behind Thornfield. Most identifications are traditional, not proven, and each pin says so.
The Romanovs' last journey runs from the Alexander Palace at Tsarskoye Selo to the governor's mansion in Tobolsk and the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg, then to Ganina Yama and Porosyonkov Log. Sixteen months after Nicholas II's abdication, none of the family was alive.
The route follows that road from the Alexander Palace through the governor's house in Tobolsk to Yekaterinburg and the forest sites nearby, where the story ended and where it was later argued over. It is told plainly, and the final stops are places of mourning for many visitors.
In the early 1900s a Russian army surveyor, Vladimir Arsenyev, mapped the wild Ussuri taiga with the help of Dersu Uzala, an indigenous hunter who read the forest better than any map. Arsenyev's memoir became a classic, and Akira Kurosawa turned it into an Oscar-winning film in 1975.
The route follows the story from Vladivostok to Lake Khanka and the Sikhote-Alin, then to Khabarovsk, Dersu's lost grave and the film's shooting base. Pins mark regions and towns, not exact campsites.
In 2035 Artyom leaves the Moscow Metro on a stolen train, the Aurora, and finds that Russia beyond the city is still alive. The sequel to Metro 2033 turns a Moscow underground story into a rail journey across the whole country.
The route follows the Volga, the Ark at Yamantau, the Caspian and Novosibirsk to Lake Baikal. The game's places are invented versions of real ones, so every pin is an area, not a level.
Assassin's Creed Mirage is set in 9th-century Baghdad, with the Round City and the House of Wisdom, and stops at Anbar, Alamut and al-Ula. Street thief Basim Ibn Ishaq becomes a Hidden One hunting the Order of the Ancients amid the Anarchy at Samarra.
The route follows him from the ruined town of Anbar to the mountain fortress of Alamut, through the districts of Baghdad and on to the oasis of al-Ula. Little of the Round City survives and the House of Wisdom is gone, so those pins are approximate; the Iraqi stops are for reading, not visiting.
Grigory Melekhov loves another man's wife, goes to war, and changes sides in the Civil War four times. Sholokhov's novel of the Don Cossacks grew out of the Upper Don, and its landscape is still there.
The route moves from the invented hamlet of Tatarsky to Vyoshenskaya, the stanitsa of the 1919 uprising, then to the villages where Sholokhov lived and wrote. Tatarsky and the monument are marked approximately.
Pushkin's novel in verse follows a bored St. Petersburg dandy who inherits a country estate, rejects a girl's love letter, kills his friend in a duel, and years later finds her transformed into the star of Petersburg society.
The route runs from the capital's garden walks to the road into Moscow and the exile estate where he wrote part of the book. Most places in the verse are glimpsed rather than described, so several pins are approximate or stand-ins.
In the summer of 1935 the young Laurie Lee left London for Spain with a violin and a single Spanish phrase. For a year he walked and played his way from Galicia to the Andalusian coast, sleeping under the open sky or in cheap posadas, welcomed even by the poorest villagers.
The route follows his memoir from Vigo through Zamora, Toledo, Tarifa and Málaga to Almuñécar, where he was rescued by a British destroyer as the Spanish Civil War began. Pins mark towns, not the roads he actually walked.
Michael Palin's Around the World in 80 Days (BBC, 1988) followed Phileas Fogg with no aircraft, from London's Reform Club to Venice, the Pyramids, Dubai, Hong Kong and Aspen. It ran from 25 September to 12 December and ended at a locked door in Pall Mall.
The route follows nine moments from his own day-by-day captions and diary excerpts: Venice, the Pyramids, a dhow from Dubai to Bombay, Hong Kong, a train to Shanghai, the Pacific, an Aspen balloon and a locked door in Pall Mall. Pins mark cities and landmarks; the real line of travel ran between them.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre.
This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
In 1974 Bruce Chatwin set out for Patagonia to find his own "piece of brontosaurus": a scrap of skin sent to his grandmother by her cousin, Charley Milward the sailor. Six months of travel became In Patagonia, the book that made his name.
This route follows the quest from a natural history museum in La Plata through the Welsh coast, Butch Cassidy's cabin and Milward's house in Punta Arenas, to the cave where the skin was found. Chatwin's tales were not always literal, so most pins mark areas, not scenes.
In the spring of 2004 Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman set out from London on motorcycles, heading east for New York with cinematographer Claudio von Planta. The ride ran from 14 April to 29 July and crossed twelve countries and 18,887 miles.
The route follows the highlights: a church built of bones in the Czech Republic, a UNICEF project in Mongolia, the mud of the Zilov Gap, the Road of Bones to Magadan, Mount Rushmore and the ride into New York. Pins mark places and areas; the real line of travel ran between them.
Bridgerton is set in London, but most of its streets are in Bath, its parks are in Wiltshire and its family home is in Greenwich.
This route follows the filming locations from the Royal Crescent and Lady Danbury's house in Bath, through London and Kent, to the country houses that played Clyvedon and Aubrey Hall in the first two seasons.
Peaky Blinders mostly filmed its 1919 Birmingham on Liverpool's Powis Street, the Worth Valley Railway and Bradford's Little Germany. Tommy Shelby's gang rules Small Heath.
The route follows the story from Small Heath, through the Liverpool street that played Watery Lane, a Yorkshire railway, Aunt Polly's village and the Black Country, to Bradford's warehouses, Tommy's country house and the beach where series 4 ends. Most pins mark stand-ins, labelled as such.
Amelia Earhart's last flight, 1937: from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae in New Guinea and Howland Island, which she never reached, and on to Nikumaroro, where one theory says she came down. A crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal made it one of history's great mysteries.
The route follows both attempts, from Oakland and Pearl Harbor to Miami, Lae and Howland Island, and ends at Nikumaroro, where one theory says she and her navigator came down. That final stop is only a hypothesis.
Disguised as a beggar, a Belgian-French explorer walked into the forbidden city of Lhasa among pilgrims. Alexandra David-Néel and her adopted son Yongden stayed two months in 1924, then slipped away before the governor could act.
The route follows her from Kumbum, where she studied for years, across the Kyi to the Potala and the Monlam crowds, then on to Samye, Tsetang and Gyantse. Pins are area-level, and critics have disputed her account since 1972.
In 1857 two British officers set out from Zanzibar to find the Great Lakes rumoured to lie in the centre of the continent and, they hoped, the source of the Nile. They found two lakes, and then fell out over what they had found.
The route runs from a failed Somali expedition through Zanzibar, Kazeh and Ujiji to Lake Victoria, then on to Speke's Ripon Falls and the Bath debate that never happened. All pins are approximate, as the sources name regions and towns rather than exact spots.
A failed Spanish expedition to Florida left four survivors, and one of them, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, walked and traded his way across the continent over roughly eight years before meeting Spaniards again in Mexico. He wrote his account from memory.
The route runs from Spain through Cuba, Florida and the Texas coast to Culiacán and Mexico City. Most stops are approximate, and the middle of the journey is not traced because historians cannot fix his route.
David Lean's 1962 epic follows T. E. Lawrence through the Arab Revolt, but most of its Arabia was built in Spain. Seville played Cairo, Jerusalem and Damascus, while Almería and a beach near Carboneras supplied the desert and a whole replica of Aqaba.
The route follows the story's order and keeps history apart from the film's shooting locations. Stops say plainly whether they show what happened in 1917 or where the cameras stood.
The Bourne Trilogy: Zurich's safe deposit box, the Paris car chase and Tangier's medina. A man with no memory is hunted by a CIA programme that wants him gone.
The route follows the three films in order, from Zurich and Paris through Mykonos, Berlin and Moscow to London and Tangier. Several cities were stand-ins for others, so the pins mark the story's places or honest approximations.
Heidi is set in Maienfeld, Switzerland: Johanna Spyri's 1881 novel opens on the village footpath, climbs to the alm above it, and sends the orphan to a grand house in Frankfurt, where homesickness makes her sleepwalk until Klara visits the mountain.
The route runs from Ragaz, where Spyri wrote the book, through Maienfeld and the alm above it to Frankfurt and the tourist Heididorf. Spyri never names the exact hamlet or house, so most pins mark an area or a tradition.
A search for the Land of Cinnamon turned into the first descent of the Amazon from the Andes to the sea. Francisco de Orellana, with the friar Gaspar de Carvajal as chronicler, followed unmapped rivers, fought off warriors on the banks and gave the river the name it still carries.
The route runs from Quito to the Napo, the Rio Negro, the Amazon's mouth and the pearl island of Cubagua. River stops are approximate, and dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar still in use then.
Nikolay Przhevalsky made one expedition to the Ussuri region and four to Central Asia, crossing the Gobi, reaching the wandering lake of Lop Nur and getting within 260 km of Lhasa. He died at Karakol on Lake Issyk-Kul, on the eve of a fifth journey.
This route follows six stops from those journeys and his years between them. They were separate expeditions rather than one trip, so the markers are not joined. Dates are years only.
In August 1803 two small Russian sloops sailed from Kronstadt on the first Russian voyage round the world. Adam Johann von Krusenstern led the expedition on the Nadezhda, and Yuri Lisyansky captained the Neva; the Neva was back almost three years later.
This route follows seven turning points, from the Marquesas and Kamchatka to the Tlingit fort at Sitka, the closed door of Nagasaki and the tea trade at Canton. The two ships often sailed apart, so the stops are markers, not one line. Day dates follow the main source, which gives the outward voyage in the modern (New Style) calendar; Russian logs of the time used the Old Style, so the homecoming in 1806 is given by season only. Pins mark towns and bays, not exact anchorages.
