Catalog
58 routes found
Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, goes looking for the secret of immortality. This route follows the epic from its city to the Cedar Forest and the flood hero's home, then to the Nineveh library where the tablets were found. The poem's places are legend and the tablets' places are archaeology; each stop says which, and which pins are only candidates. The Iraqi sites are not visitor destinations.
Two Naughty Dog adventures, two treasure hunts: the Drake brothers chase a pirate hoard from a hidden cathedral in the Scottish Highlands to the fabled pirate utopia of Libertalia, and Chloe Frazer and Nadine Ross follow a trail of Hindu temples through India's Western Ghats to the Tusk of Ganesh. The route follows both games in order. Madagascar and Karnataka have real pirate coves and real Hoysala temples behind the fiction, but the games' exact settings are invented, so every pin marks the nearest real place.
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.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London Victoria on a four-month railway loop through Europe, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, then came back on the Trans-Siberian Railway. His travelogue, published in 1975, became a classic of the genre. This route follows episodes the book's reviewers single out, from the Direct-Orient Express to Istanbul, Calcutta, Burma, Vietnam and Tokyo. The book's own text could not be checked, so some pins mark a city's station rather than a scene, and some places are not safe to visit now.
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.
Tommy Shelby's gang rules 1919 Birmingham, but the streets, trains and mansions you see on screen are mostly somewhere else. The route follows the story from Small Heath, through the Liverpool street that played Watery Lane, a Yorkshire railway, Aunt Polly's village and the Black Country, to Bradford's warehouses, Tommy's country house and the beach where series 4 ends. Most pins mark stand-ins, labelled as such.
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 man with no memory, a safe deposit box and a CIA programme that wants him gone: Jason Bourne runs across Europe and beyond, and the films keep him on real streets, stations and squares. The route follows the three films in order, from Zurich and Paris through Mykonos, Berlin and Moscow to London and Tangier. Several cities were stand-ins for others, so the pins mark the story's places or honest approximations.
In March 1697 a great Russian embassy left Moscow for Europe, and the tsar went with it incognito as "Peter Mikhailov", though at 2.03 metres he was one of the tallest men around. He worked in shipyards, studied gunnery and tried to broaden the Holy League against the Ottoman Empire. The route follows the journey stop by stop: Riga and Königsberg, the Dutch shipyards, London and Deptford, then Vienna and the meeting with Augustus II at Rava-Ruska. Dates follow each source: the Dutch article uses the Gregorian calendar, the English and Russian sources the Old Style, so the labels say which.
Victor Frankenstein grows up on the shore of Lake Geneva, builds his creature in the university town of Ingolstadt, and spends the rest of the book running from it, across a glacier above Chamonix, to a rock in the Orkneys and back to the lake. Mary Shelley's novel is a chain of scenes scattered over several countries rather than one trip. This route visits six of them in story order, quoting the novel's Project Gutenberg text. The novel names towns and a glacier but rarely a building, so most pins mark a town or area.
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.
The floating Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora do not exist, but the pillars behind them do. This route follows the film from its Los Angeles capture stage to the sandstone towers of Hunan, and on to the rival claim for Huangshan and the Pandora land in Florida. Expect inspiration rather than filming locations: the film was made largely on stages, so the Chinese pins are stand-ins and credited influences.
Nioh sends William Adams, a blond outsider who becomes Ieyasu's ally, through a dark-fantasy version of 1600: demons in the mud of Japan's civil wars, alchemist Edward Kelley behind them, and Tokugawa Ieyasu rising above it all. Its story is stitched onto real places, from a London prison to the battlefield that made the Tokugawa shoguns. The route follows the main campaign and its last two expansions: the Tower of London, Kyoto, Sekigahara, then the Sanada-maru, Tennōji and Osaka Castle. The game is fantasy, so the map shows where its history happened, not where it was filmed or modelled.
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.
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.
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.
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.
King Arthur sets out across Britain in AD 932 to find knights and, in the end, the Holy Grail. When the National Trust withdrew its permission to film at several castles, the Monty Python team had little time to find new locations, so one fortress had to play most of the others. This route follows the quest in film order through six locations: the castle of the opening shot in Wales, Doune Castle in Scotland standing in for the rest, a moated castle in East Sussex for one establishing shot, a mine, a glen and the island tower that ends the film.