Assassin's Creed (2007) recreates the Holy Land of 1191: Masyaf, Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem, with Solomon's Temple and Richard's camp at Arsuf. Altaïr loses his rank after a botched mission and wins it back one target at a time: nine men in three cities, all secretly Templars.
The route follows the story from the Temple in Jerusalem to the Assassins' fortress of Masyaf, through Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem, to a duel in King Richard's camp. The game's cities are rebuilt for play, so every pin marks the real place the scene is anchored to.
The Old English poem Beowulf is set in Denmark and Sweden, and a surprising number of its kings, battles and halls turn up in Scandinavian sources and in the ground. Follow the hero from his Geatish homeland to Hrothgar's hall, then to the raid in Frisia, the royal mounds at Uppsala, and the English ship burial and library shelf where the poem survived.
Most identifications here are traditional rather than proven, and the pins say so.
Fionn mac Cumhaill is the hero of Irish legend who gained all knowledge by burning his thumb on a salmon, saved Tara from a fire-breather and, in folk tales, built the Giant's Causeway to reach a Scottish rival. His stories are tied to real hills, rivers and rocks, many of them still named for him.
The route follows his legend from the Boyne of his boyhood through Tara, the Hill of Allen, Slieve Gullion and Benbulben, then to the tall tales of Lough Neagh, the Causeway and Fingal's Cave. Nothing here is history: pins mark where tradition places each tale.
A Cornish knight fetches an Irish princess for his uncle the king, and a love potion on the ship ruins everything. Tristan and Iseult is a medieval legend told in many versions since the 12th century, and every retelling sets it on a slightly different map.
This route follows the lovers from Tristan's drowned homeland to Dublin, Cornwall and Brittany, ending on the island that carries his name. Almost every site is a tradition rather than a fact, so each pin says how sure it is.
Njáls saga is set in real places in south Iceland: Gunnar meets his wife at Þingvellir, makes his last stand at Hlíðarendi, and Njáll's farm at Bergþórshvoll burns. Two friends, one famed for strength and one for wisdom, are dragged by a chain of insults and killings towards a night of fire.
The route runs from the national assembly at Þingvellir, where Gunnar meets his future wife, through Gunnar's farm at Hlíðarendi, an ice-bank leap on the Markarfljót and the Law Rock, to Njáll's farm at Bergþórshvoll. The saga names the farms, but not every exact spot, so some pins mark the area.
A baker's oven in Pudding Lane, a gale from the east and a city of timber and pitch: in four days in September 1666 the fire destroyed medieval London, including Old St Paul's. Samuel Pepys watched it from the Tower, from the river and from a church tower, and wrote it all down.
The route follows the fire from its first spark on Sunday morning to its end on Wednesday, then to the Monument and the Golden Boy that remember it. Where the sources give only an area, such as the refugee camps at Moorfields, the pin marks it loosely.
In the summer of 1588 a Spanish fleet appeared off Cornwall with a plan to join Parma's army. Beacons carried the news to London, the English fleet came out of Plymouth, and within weeks fireships, a day of heavy gunnery and autumn storms had ended the plan.
The route follows the campaign through seven places, from the first sighting to a beach in County Sligo where three ships broke up. Most of the fighting was at sea, so the pins mark the nearest coast landmark, and the story of Drake and his game of bowls at Plymouth is labelled as legend.
On the night of 14 April 1865 John Wilkes Booth shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington and escaped on horseback. Lincoln died the next morning in a house across the street; Booth was hunted down twelve days later in a Virginia barn, in what was then the largest manhunt in US history.
The route follows both threads in turn: the theater and the room where Lincoln died, then Booth's road south through the Navy Yard Bridge, a Maryland tavern, a doctor's farmhouse and a swamp, to the farm where it ended.
In 1960 the novelist John Steinbeck fitted a pickup truck with a camper shell, named it Rocinante and set out from Long Island with his poodle, Charley. He wanted to see his country because he made his living writing about it, and his main question was what Americans are like today.
This route follows eight stops of the outer loop, from Sag Harbor through Maine, Niagara Falls and Minnesota to Montana, Yellowstone and Steinbeck's native Salinas Valley, then down to New Orleans. The book is a novelist's account: it has been challenged as partly fictionalised, so read the encounters as stories and the places as real.
On 10 November 1871, on the shore of Lake Tanganyika, the journalist Henry M. Stanley took off his hat in front of a crowd and said, as he tells it in his own book, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" The explorer many thought dead had been found, after nearly eight months on the road from the coast.
The route follows Stanley's account, How I Found Livingstone, over eight stops: from Zanzibar and Bagamoyo through Mpwapwa, Tabora and the Malagarasi to Ujiji, then up the lake to Mugere and back to the parting at Tabora. Stanley's camps are rarely identifiable today, so every pin is approximate.
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.
Toru Watanabe, a drama student in late-1960s Tokyo, looks back on the years he spent between two women: Naoko, the fragile girlfriend of his dead best friend, and Midori, a classmate who is everything Naoko is not. Haruki Murakami's 1987 novel made him a superstar in Japan.
The route follows Watanabe across the city: his dormitory, a long Sunday walk by the moat, Naoko's apartment in Kokubunji, the campus, the streetcar to Midori's neighbourhood, a house at the edge of Kichijōji and the platform at Ueno. Murakami drew on his own student years, but the novel's dormitory and university are invented, so those two pins mark real stand-ins.
Raskolnikov's St Petersburg on a map: his garret, the pawnbroker's house, Sennaya Square, the canal and the bridges of the Neva. On an exceptionally hot July evening he counts exactly 730 steps to her door, and Dostoevsky 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.
War and Peace travels from the Rostovs' house on Moscow's Povarskaya and Bald Hills, modelled on Yasnaya Polyana, through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to Borodino, Fili and Poklonnaya Hill in 1812. Prince Andrew falls under the lofty sky at Austerlitz; Pierre, a civilian in a white hat, climbs the Raevsky redoubt.
The route follows the book from a Moscow house and a country estate through Schöngrabern and Austerlitz to 1812: Borodino, the council at Fili and Napoleon waiting on Poklonnaya Hill. Some stops are real places Tolstoy wrote about, others are real stand-ins for places that exist only in the novel; each says which. Dates follow the modern calendar, with Tolstoy's Old Style date noted where it differs.
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.
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.
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.
The Travels of Marco Polo runs from Venice and Acre to Kublai Khan's Xanadu, then south to Hangzhou and home again. In 1271 a seventeen-year-old Venetian set out with his father and uncle and did not come home for 24 years.
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.
Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast about his poor, happy early years in 1920s Paris, working from notebooks he had left in trunks at the Ritz in 1928. It was published in 1964, after his death.
This route walks the memoir's Paris: the flat on the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, Gertrude Stein's salon, Sylvia Beach's bookshop, the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain, and the Ritz where the notebooks resurfaced. Hemingway himself said the book may be read as imagination, so treat its scenes as a memory, not a record.
Huck Finn fakes his own murder and, with Jim, who has run away from slavery, takes a raft down the Mississippi. Their goal is Cairo, where Jim would be a free man the minute he saw it. They miss it in the fog and drift on into slave country, past a feud, two con men and a farm with the book's last twist.
Twain built St. Petersburg from his boyhood town of Hannibal. Most places in the novel are invented, so each pin marks a real landmark or stand-in, and the Grangerfords' country and Bricksville stay off the map.
Before the white whale there is a cold December and a wrong turn at the docks. Ishmael arrives in New Bedford to find the Nantucket packet gone, rents half a bed at the Spouter-Inn, sits through a sermon on Jonah, crosses to Nantucket and signs aboard the Pequod, which leaves on Christmas Day.
New Bedford had overtaken Nantucket as the country's top whaling port by 1840, yet Ishmael is set on sailing from the island. The route follows his first chapters. The inn, the Try Pots and the Pequod are invented, so their pins mark real places that stand in for them; the chapel is real.
Santiago, a shepherd boy from Andalusia, keeps dreaming of treasure at the Egyptian pyramids. A fortune-teller and a mysterious old king send him across the strait to Africa, where he is robbed in Tangier, falls in love at an oasis and crosses a desert of warring tribes. Paulo Coelho's 1988 fable has sold more than 150 million copies.
The route follows the boy from a ruined church to the Giza plateau and back again. The book keeps its geography loose, so most pins mark the best-known place for a scene rather than a spot the author names.
Thelma & Louise runs from Arkansas to the Grand Canyon, but it was filmed in California and Utah, around Long Beach, Los Angeles, Arches and Dead Horse Point. One violent night at a roadhouse bar turns a weekend trip into a run for Mexico.
This route follows the story in film order through six real places: a Long Beach bar, a Los Angeles motel, a Colorado general store, the desert at Arches, the ghost town of Cisco and the cliff edge at Dead Horse Point. Almost all of them stand in for somewhere else, and each stop says where.
A retired detective with a fear of heights is hired to follow a friend's wife around San Francisco, because her husband fears she is possessed by Carlotta Valdes, a woman who died in 1857. Hitchcock's 1958 thriller was shot on location in San Francisco, at Mission San Juan Bautista, in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, at Cypress Point on 17-Mile Drive and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood.
This route follows the story in film order through nine places: a vanished restaurant, a Nob Hill apartment block, a mission cemetery and an art museum, a fort under the Golden Gate Bridge, a coastal kiss, a mission bell tower and a hotel with a green neon sign.
