Peter Jackson shot all three Lord of the Rings films at once, in 438 days between October 1999 and December 2000, at more than 150 locations across New Zealand's North and South Islands. Farmland became the Shire, a regional park became Rivendell, a lonely hill in Canterbury became the capital of Rohan, and a volcano in Tongariro National Park stood in for Mount Doom.
This route follows Frodo's story through eight of those places, most of them easy to visit. Some sets were rebuilt for visitors; others were removed and the land returned to how it was. The mountains of Tongariro are sacred to local Māori, so please admire the summits from below.
The Irish legend of the Children of Lir runs from Lough Derravaragh in Westmeath to the Sea of Moyle off County Antrim, the mouth of the Bann, and Erris and Inishglora on the Mayo coast.
Four children of the sea-lord Lir are turned into swans by their jealous stepmother and spend 900 years on Ireland's waters. The route follows the three 300-year sentences to the bell that ends them. Several pins mark traditional areas, not exact spots.
Miyamoto Musashi, Japan's most famous swordsman, moves through this route from the Sekigahara campaign of 1600 to the duel on Ganryū Island, Osaka Castle, Kumamoto Castle and the cave of Reigandō, where he wrote The Book of Five Rings.
The route follows the biography stop by stop, from a village birthplace that sources place in two provinces to the cave where he spent his last years. Several details, including his role at Sekigahara and Osaka, are debated or rest on later accounts.
The Shire is partly Birmingham: Tolkien said Sarehole Mill and its pond inspired the Mill at Hobbiton, and the wooded Moseley Bog beside it fed the ancient forests of his books. Both lie in the suburbs of Birmingham, England.
The route follows Tolkien from his childhood at Sarehole and Moseley Bog, past Perrott's Folly in Edgbaston, to North Oxford, where he wrote The Hobbit, and the Eagle and Child pub, where the Inklings met. Some links are Tolkien's own words; the Folly is only a suggestion.
Shakespeare's Macbeth is set in Scotland, from a heath near Forres and Glamis Castle to Dunsinane Hill. Its thane titles, coronation and a marching wood all belong to real names on the map. The real Macbeth ruled from 1040 to 1057, and the play takes liberties with him.
The route follows the story from the witches' prophecy to the final duel, through Glamis, Cawdor, Scone, the Birnam Oak and Dunsinane. Several places carry the play's names without staging its scenes, and each stop says so.
Real Boys (Реальные пацаны) is set and filmed in Perm, from the «Счастье не за горами» sign on the Kama embankment to Kolyan's flat in the House of the Loader.
The mockumentary ran from 2010 to 2023 and followed a Perm lad and his friends for ten seasons, with the city playing itself. This route visits the filming sites: the phone shop where Kolyan meets Lera, the garage on Malaya Yamskaya, the police set in the Palace of Youth, the university globe, Gorky Park, the wedding restaurant and the cafe the lads try to run. Some of them are now shops or offices.
Girls und Panzer sends high-school girls into tank tournaments, and its home port is a real Japanese town. Ōarai in Ibaraki appears in the series so faithfully that fans flocked to it as soon as the anime aired.
This route follows the story through six places: the harbour of the school ship, the mall and the inn of the episode 4 street battle, the station where the tank trains roll in, and the shrine steps and coast of the film's exhibition match. The series does not name every street, so some pins are approximate.
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.
Ghost of Yōtei follows Atsu, a wandering mercenary who returns to Ezo — modern-day Hokkaido — in 1603 to hunt down the Yōtei Six, the band led by the samurai lord Nariaki Saito who slaughtered her family sixteen years earlier. Her revenge carries her across an island modelled on Hokkaido, from the grasslands at Mount Yōtei's foot to the frozen north and the Matsumae clan's castle in the south.
This route follows the game's regions and their real counterparts: the Yotei Grasslands around Lake Shikotsu, the Ishikari Plain, the Ainu country of the Nayoro Wilds, the Kitsune's Teshio Ridge, and the Tokachi Range, with Mount Yōtei and Matsumae Castle as its fixed points.
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.
