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 1893 Fridtjof Nansen froze a purpose-built ship into the Arctic ice on purpose. His bet was that the pack would carry it across the top of the world, and the sceptics called it self-destruction.
This route follows the voyage from Vardø to the pack ice, the drift, the sledge dash to 86°14′N, a hard winter in a stone hut and a lucky meeting at Cape Flora, ending at the museum where the ship rests. Ocean and ice stops have no map pin.
On 6 January 1482, a poet, a gypsy dancer, a deaf bellringer and a tormented priest cross paths in the Paris of Victor Hugo's imagination. It is a city of crowds, bonfires, gibbets and a cathedral that is almost a character in its own right.
This route follows the story from the Palais de Justice to the square where punishments were held, the beggars' court, the Seine bridge, Notre-Dame itself and the hilltop gibbet. Much of medieval Paris is gone, so most pins mark an area rather than a surviving building.
The Kojiki, compiled in 711-712, is the oldest surviving book in Japan. It tells how the gods quarrelled over the land, how Amaterasu hid in a cave, how Izumo yielded to her line and how her grandson came down to earth.
This route follows that story to seven places, from Izumo to Takachiho, Kirishima and Ise. The myth is what the text tells; the shrine foundings and excavations are documented history, and each stop keeps the two apart. Several sites are traditional identifications that rival places also claim.
For over a thousand years, emperors, samurai and ordinary people have walked mountain trails to three shrines of the ancient syncretic Kumano religion. Emperor Go-Shirakawa alone made the trip 34 times, and in the Muromachi period the stream of walkers was called a "pilgrimage of ants".
This route follows the Nakahechi from Takijiri-oji through Chikatsuyu and Hongū, by river to Shingū, then to Nachi's stone steps and waterfall. Some stops are pinned to the area rather than a surveyed spot.
Between 1180 and 1185 Japan's two great warrior clans, Taira and Minamoto, fought over the realm, and the war ended with a child emperor, a fleet and the tide at Dan-no-ura. It was the war that led to the first shogun.
This route visits seven battlefield sites in date order, from the bridge at Uji to the Kanmon Straits. Documented events are kept apart from the Heike Monogatari's legends, which the text attributes to the tale. Most battle areas are approximate.
The golden king who rafted out into a mountain lake in a coat of gold dust is a legend, first written down generations after the conquest. The gold, the Spanish expeditions, the draining of the lake and a small golden raft in a museum are history.
The route follows both threads, and each stop says which is which: Quesada's march in 1537, the lake itself, the drainage, a rival lake, the cave where a raft turned up in 1969 and the Bogotá museum that keeps it.
In April 1519 Cortés landed on the coast of Veracruz; in August 1521 the Aztec capital fell. In between came alliances, a massacre, a night of disaster on a causeway and an eight-month siege.
The route follows the campaign from Villa Rica to Tlatelolco and sets the Spanish accounts of Cortés and Díaz beside Tlaxcalan and Aztec ones where they are known. Where the accounts conflict, the stop says so.
In Anohana, six childhood friends drift apart after one of them, Menma, dies in an accident. Years later her ghost appears to Jinta, the group's former leader, and asks for a wish to be granted, and the old friends gather again in their hometown of Chichibu, Saitama.
The town is real, and the route follows the places the anime shows: the hill and overlook of Hitsujiyama Park, a road beside the railway, two bridges over the Arakawa, the temple where the friends keep gathering, and the festival scaffold where their homemade firework is launched. The secret base itself has no real-life twin.
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.
The greatest of the Icelandic sagas is a story of two friends, one famous for his strength and one for his wisdom, and of how a chain of insults, killings and neat legal settlements drags both families towards a night of fire. It is told almost entirely in real places in south and south-west Iceland.
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.
Sent out by King Eurystheus, Heracles must kill a lion that no arrow can pierce, a many-headed Hydra, and man-eating birds with bronze beaks, and also catch a hind that outruns arrows and a boar on a snowy mountain, and clean a stable of thirty years' dung without help.
This route follows the first six labours in their traditional order, from the fortress of Tiryns through Nemea, Lerna, Ceryneia, Erymanthos and Elis to Lake Stymphalia. The myth rarely names an exact spot, so most pins mark the place the tale is tied to, not a cave or a lair.
On the night of 18 April 1775 Paul Revere was rowed across the Charles River, got a horse in Charlestown and rode west to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that British troops were on the move. He left three accounts of that night, and this route follows them rather than the poem.
It runs through nine places, from his house in North Square and the lanterns at Old North Church to the pasture in Lincoln where a British patrol stopped him, and on to Concord, which Samuel Prescott reached without him. Where a spot is only traditional, the stop says so.
A stranger who looks foreign joins two writers at Patriarch's Ponds, predicts a death, and Moscow's strangest spring begins. In Bulgakov's novel the devil, as Woland, visits Soviet Moscow with a retinue that includes the cat Behemoth and the henchman Azazello, while Margarita bargains with him for the Master.
The route follows the Moscow chapters in order: the ponds where it all starts, a writers' club, a haunted flat, a stage show, a flight of revenge, a ball, a terrace beside the Kremlin and a farewell on the Sparrow Hills. Several places are invented or only inspired by real ones, and each stop says which.
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.
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.
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.
Tommy sets out for Seattle to hunt Abby, and Ellie and Dina follow him into a ruined city where the WLF militia and a cult, the Seraphites, fight for control. The Last of Us Part II plays the same three days twice: first as Ellie, then as Abby. The city is the real one: Naughty Dog chose Seattle for its hills and varied weather, and its artists travelled there to study the architecture, vegetation and topography.
This route follows both runs. Ellie's: the synagogue they call the Dome, the Pinnacle Theatre, the convention centre and its stalkers, the hospital and the aquarium. Abby's: the stadium she lives in, the Great Wheel of her memories, the Chinatown Gate and the Space Needle seen from the island. Many of the game's buildings carry new names; each stop names the real one behind it.
The journey south ran through Morocco first. For the third season the Atlantic ramparts of Essaouira stood in for Astapor, the slaver city where Daenerys buys an army of eunuch soldiers, and the earthen ksar of Aït Benhaddou stood in for Yunkai, whose two hundred thousand slaves she promises to free. When the story turned to Dorne, Spain answered: the Alcázar of Seville became the Water Gardens of House Martell, and the bullring at Osuna the fighting pits of Meereen.
Six stops in the order the episodes aired — two in Morocco, four in Spain. The last two are the biggest set-pieces of the sixth and seventh seasons: Girona's cathedral and steps as the Sept of Baelor, and the Roman ruins at Itálica as the ruined Dragonpit.
Sunja grows up in her mother's boarding house on Yeongdo, an island in the harbour of Busan, under Japanese rule. Pregnant by a married man, she marries a gentle minister instead and leaves with him for Osaka, where Koreans live poor and despised in a neighbourhood called Ikaino. The Apple TV+ series (2022–2024), based on Min Jin Lee's 2017 novel, follows four generations of her family from 1915 to 1989.
The route follows the family through real places in Korea and Japan, in story order. Homes, shops and offices in the series are fictional, so the pins mark the neighbourhoods and cities where the story is set, not filming locations.
Two branches of one royal family, the five Pandava brothers and their hundred Kaurava cousins, quarrel over the throne of the Kuru kingdom. The Pandavas survive a murder plot, win the princess Draupadi, build a splendid capital, lose everything in a rigged game of dice and spend thirteen years in exile before the families meet in an eighteen-day war at Kurukshetra. The Sanskrit epic, one of the longest poems ever composed, also holds the Bhagavad Gita.
Northern India is dotted with places that tradition links to the story, several of them with real Iron Age remains. This route follows the Pandavas through those traditional sites. They are identifications of faith and local memory; archaeology has found ancient towns, but not the epic's events.
King Pelias sends his nephew Jason to fetch the Golden Fleece from Colchis, at the far end of the Black Sea, hoping he will never come back. Jason builds the Argo, gathers the greatest heroes of his day, Heracles among them, and sails east. Apollonius of Rhodes told the voyage in his Argonautica in the 3rd century BC, and he filled it with real coasts, harbours and local legends.
This route follows the outward voyage to Colchis. The way home is left out: ancient writers sent the Argo back by wildly different routes, up rivers into the Adriatic and even across Libya. The heroes and the fleece are myth; the shores, islands and ancient cities are real. Quotations are from R. C. Seaton's 1912 translation.
In August 1914 France expels its German residents, and Karl is torn from his French wife Marie and their baby on a farm near Saint-Mihiel and drafted into the German army. Marie's father Emile is called up on the other side. Ubisoft Montpellier's hand-drawn 2014 game, made for the war's centenary, follows them, an American volunteer called Freddie, a Belgian nurse, Anna, and Walt the medic dog across four years of the Western Front.
The heroes are invented, but the battles are not, and every chapter is full of real objects and short historical notes. This route visits the places the story passes through, from the Marne in 1914 to the Chemin des Dames in 1917. Most are now memorials, museums or preserved battlefields.
