A retired sake brewer set out on foot to measure Japan. Over ten surveys starting in 1800 Inō Tadataka and his team paced the coasts and paths of the country, and maps based on his work were still in use in 1924.
The route follows his life in places: the brewer's house at Sawara, the shrine where he prayed before the first survey, Mount Hakodate and the far end of that journey in Hokkaido, Nihonbashi, his grave and the shrine that honours him. The surveys were separate expeditions, so the stops are not one connected walk.
On 26 February 1815 Napoleon slipped away from Elba with some 1,000 men. Within a month he was back in the Tuileries, and by mid-July he had surrendered to the Royal Navy.
The route follows him stop by stop: his villa on Elba, the landing at Golfe-Juan, the meeting at Laffrey and the entry into Grenoble on the Route Napoléon, the Tuileries, the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte at Waterloo, then Malmaison and Île d'Aix, where his journey ended. The pins at Golfe-Juan and Grenoble mark the towns, not exact spots.
Victor Hugo's 1862 novel follows the convict Jean Valjean from the night a bishop's kindness turns him towards good, through years as a respected factory owner and the rescuer of a child, to the street fighting of June 1832. This route follows that path from a bishop's town in the south to the sewers and bridges of Paris.
Hugo hid two of the towns behind initials and the wine-shop barricade has been built over, so only the Luxembourg Garden is pinned exactly; the other stops mark real places standing in for the book's.
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.
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.
