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.
In December 1933, eighteen-year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor set off from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople, carrying a few clothes, some letters of introduction, an anthology of English verse and a volume of Horace. He slept in barns and shepherds' huts, but gentry and aristocracy kept inviting him into their country houses. He wrote the journey up decades later in A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road.
The route follows him through ten places the sources let us pin, from the Hook and a Stuttgart apartment to Melk, Vienna, Prague, the bridge into Hungary, an island on the Danube that now lies under water, Plovdiv and Istanbul. Many pins are approximate: the sources name a town, not the exact spot where he stood.
At 21, Jack London sailed north in July 1897 to join the Klondike gold rush. He came home without gold but with scurvy and the stories that made his name: The Call of the Wild, "To Build a Fire" and more.
This route follows him from the beach at Dyea over the Chilkoot Pass, down the lakes and rapids of the Yukon, through a winter at the Stewart River to Dawson City, where his cabin still stands.
A few hundred Cossacks, a Stroganov fortress on the Kama and a khan's capital on the Irtysh: in four years Yermak turned a raid into the Russian entry into Siberia.
The route follows the campaign from Orel-gorodok over the Urals to the battle at Chuvash Cape, the fall of Qashliq, Yermak's death at the Vagay and the founding of Tobolsk. Dates differ between chronicles and modern sources, and the sources mark the death site and the legends as uncertain; the notes at each stop say which.
Cut off from the rest of the country, Leningrad lived through the winter of 1941–42 on 125 grams of bread a day, half of it sawdust. This route follows the siege through the places that carried the city through: a fortress island, an ice road, a seed bank, a diary, a symphony.
It runs from the first day of the encirclement to the memorials that came after, and keeps to documented facts. Several stops are memorials: please visit with respect.
Two Dickens novels, one city of thieves' dens, prisons and cramped lodgings. Oliver Twist is dragged into Fagin's gang in the lanes of Holborn, while Pip of Great Expectations arrives from the Kent marshes expecting a soft white city and finds filth.
The route follows Oliver and Nancy from Saffron Hill to London Bridge, Jacob's Island and Newgate, then Pip from Cooling churchyard through Rochester to Little Britain and Barnard's Inn. Several places are traditional models rather than named settings, and each pin says so.
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.
In autumn 1988 the BBC sent Michael Palin round the globe in the footsteps of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg, with no aircraft allowed. It began and ended at the Reform Club in London and ran from 25 September to 12 December.
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.
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.
In 1937 Amelia Earhart tried to become the first woman to fly around the world, on a roughly equatorial route. Two attempts, a crash in Hawaii and a lost radio signal over the Pacific turned her flight into 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.
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.
A five-year-old orphan is led up a Swiss mountain path to live with a grandfather the whole village avoids. Johanna Spyri's 1881 novel follows Heidi from the alm to a grand house in Frankfurt, where homesickness sends her sleepwalking, and back to the mountain, where her friend Klara finally comes to visit.
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.
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 1725 a Russian naval captain set out across a continent to answer one question: are Asia and America joined? Vitus Bering's two Kamchatka expeditions, the second of them part of the Great Northern Expedition, took years of hardship to answer it.
The route follows seven places from the Tsar's order in Saint Petersburg to Bering's death on an uninhabited island in 1741. The stops are not one continuous line, so they are shown as separate markers. Dates are Old Style (Julian), as Russian records of the time kept them; the modern calendar runs 11 days ahead.
Patrick Süskind's Perfume follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in Paris in 1738, with a gift for scent and no scent of his own. His path runs from the Innocents cemetery to a mountain cave, and then to Grasse, where his craft turns murderous.
The route follows the book from Paris to the Plomb du Cantal, Montpellier and Grasse, and ends in Barcelona, where Tom Tykwer's film rebuilt Paris. Only a few places are named exactly; the rest are approximate.
Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is a Stockholm novel before it is a thriller: journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander live, drink and work on Södermalm, the island district where much of the action takes place.
This route walks the real addresses behind the books, from Blomkvist's home on Bellmansgatan to Lisbeth's penthouse on Fiskargatan, and ends at the City Museum that runs the official tour. Some addresses are private homes, so most are seen from the street.
In July 1497 four ships left Lisbon to find a sea route to India. Vasco da Gama's fleet crossed the open South Atlantic, rounded the Cape, worked its way up the African coast, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage ended with two ships and over half the men lost.
The route follows the voyage from the Restelo shore in Lisbon to Calicut, then home via Anjediva and the Azores. Landing sites are mostly debated or only broadly known, so most pins are approximate. Dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar then in use.
In September 1786 Goethe slipped away from Carlsbad at 3 in the morning, telling none of his friends, and headed for Italy. He was arrested for drawing a castle, met the ancient world at Verona, and shared a house in Rome with a painter.
The route follows his diary from Carlsbad over the Brenner and the Italian lakeshore to Verona, Venice and Rome, then to Vesuvius and Sicily. Some stops are towns or mountains rather than single buildings; the pin accuracy says which.
In September 1799 the Russian field marshal Suvorov led his army into Switzerland to join the Allied forces, only to find his allies failing him. He fought through the Alps, crossed high passes and ended in Chur.
The route follows the march from Taverne to Chur. Dates are Gregorian (New Style), and pins mark villages or passes rather than battlefields.
A seventeen-year-old heir is sold to a brig bound for the colonies, wrecked off Mull, and thrown into the heather beside a fugitive named Alan. Stevenson's chase carries them from the Firth of Forth through Appin and the Highlands to the bridge at Stirling.
The route follows David's journey in chapter order, from the Queensferry inn where he is handed over to the old bridge where the pair cross the Forth. Several scenes rest on real events, such as the Appin murder and Cluny MacPherson's hiding place.
In 1751 the Qianlong Emperor left Beijing for the first of six tours south to Jiangnan, the last in 1784. Much of the way ran along the Grand Canal, and the tours took in the dikes of the Huai, the cities of Jiangnan and the holy sites of Shandong.
This route follows the first two tours. In 1751: the Hongze Lake embankment, West Lake and Mount Tai. In 1757: Yangzhou, Suzhou and Qufu. Dates follow the Chinese lunar calendar used in the court records.
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming court sent a fleet from Nanjing across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, seven times, under the admiral Zheng He. It came home with ambassadors and exotic animals.
This route follows the sequence from the shipyard in Nanjing through Java, Malacca, Ceylon, Calicut and Hormuz to Malindi in East Africa, and ends at his empty tomb. Most ports are approximate pins, and later temple traditions are marked as such.
China's first emperor unified the warring states in 221 BC and spent his last decade building: a capital, canals, walls, palaces and a vast tomb. Some of what is told about him is documented history; some is legend.
This route visits seven places tied to him, from Xianyang to the Terracotta Army. Stops marked as legend or speculative (the elixir quest on Zhifu Island, the lost course of the Qin wall) are kept apart from sites that archaeology has confirmed.
