The Battle of Britain was fought over south-east England in 1940, and its places are still there: Dover, RAF Biggin Hill, RAF Kenley, RAF Hornchurch, RAF Tangmere and the underground Uxbridge bunker.
The route follows the summer of 1940 from the Dunkirk headquarters at Dover Castle through the Kent and Sussex fighter fields, which were bombed in August, to the operations room where Churchill watched 15 September. Many sites are now museums, parks or airports.
The Underground Railroad's northern routes ran from Maryland's Eastern Shore through Wilmington and the Ohio River towns to Niagara Falls and Dresden, Ontario. This route follows seven real places linked to it, from Harriet Tubman's escape to the Dawn settlement.
It joins Harriet Tubman's park in Maryland, Thomas Garrett's Wilmington, the Rankin and Levi Coffin houses, the Freedom Center in Cincinnati, the Niagara bridge and the Dawn settlement. The stops follow the geography, not one person's single journey.
Tamerlane (Timur) was born near Shahrisabz and buried in Samarkand, and in between he built palaces, mosques and tombs from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, and fought the Ottomans at Ankara.
The route follows his reign from his family's tombs at Shah-i-Zinda in 1372 to his own at Gur-e-Amir, with stops at the Ak-Saray Palace, the Yasawi Mausoleum, the Battle of Ankara and the Bibi-Khanym Mosque.
The Battle of Gettysburg was fought around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, from 1 to 3 July 1863, at places like McPherson Ridge, Culp's Hill, Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge.
This route follows the three days in order, from the opening shots to Pickett's Charge, then ends at Gettysburg National Cemetery, where Lincoln came on 19 November. The Angle and Culp's Hill pins are approximate.
Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who kept fighting on Lubang Island in the Philippines until 1974, is traced here from the Nakano School in Tokyo to Lubang's mountains and Manila's Malacañang Palace.
Sent to Lubang on 26 December 1944 with orders never to surrender, Onoda stayed in hiding for 28 years, 6 months and 8 days after Japan's surrender. The route follows his training, his years in the hills, his surrender in March 1974 and a disputed return visit in 1996. Several locations are approximate, and accounts of the violence on the island are contested.
Hashima, nicknamed Gunkanjima or Battleship Island, lies about 15 km off Nagasaki, and its coal mine grew from the same story as Glover Garden, the Kosuge Slip Dock and the Takashima mine.
The route follows Nagasaki's industrial rise from 1859: the Scottish merchant Thomas Blake Glover, Japan's first western-style dock, a pioneering coal shaft, the Mitsubishi shipyard and finally Hashima, packed with 5,259 people in 1959 and empty after 1974. It also records the wartime forced labour of Korean civilians and Chinese prisoners of war on Hashima.
The Battle of Okinawa, fought from March to June 1945, ran from the Kerama Islands and the Kadena landing beaches to Shuri Castle and Mabuni Hill in the south of the island.
This route follows the land campaign through six places you can find on a map today, from the first landing to the Cornerstone of Peace, where the names of those who died on all sides are inscribed. Several sites are memorials, and the pins for the Kerama Islands and Kakazu Ridge are approximate.
In This Corner of the World is set in Hiroshima and Kure, Japan, during the Second World War. Suzu Urano grows up in Eba, sketches at the Atomic Bomb Dome building, and marries into a family in the naval port of Kure.
The route follows Fumiyo Kōno's story from Suzu's hometown of Eba to the Kure Naval Arsenal and Niko Park, where the Hōjō family goes to see the cherry blossoms in spring 1945. Kure's Hōjō home is only approximately placed.
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell toured Scotland and the Hebrides in 1773, visiting Monboddo House, Raasay, Inch Kenneth, Iona and Auchinleck. Johnson was sixty-three, Boswell thirty-two, and the journey took eighty-three days.
The route follows five places where their two books touch real ground: a philosopher in farmer's clothes, a dance on Raasay, island hospitality, the ruins of Iona and Boswell's family seat in Ayrshire. The sources do not give exact dates for each stop.
York has been defended by walls since Roman times, and this walk strings together six places around them: the Multangular Tower, York Minster, Clifford's Tower, Micklegate Bar, the Shambles and Walmgate Bar.
Each stop is a moment in the city's story, from a Roman fort built around 71 AD to a siege in 1644.
Julius Caesar's last decade runs from the siege of Alesia in Gaul through the Rubicon, Pharsalus in Greece and besieged Alexandria to the Curia of Pompey in Rome, where he died on the Ides of March, 44 BC.
Six stops follow the Gallic Wars, the civil war and the assassination. Where the exact site is debated, the pins say so.
Gone with the Wind is set in Georgia: Tara lies about five miles outside Jonesboro, and Scarlett O'Hara's Atlanta runs along Peachtree Street. The depot, Five Points and Oakland Cemetery are real Atlanta places the story names.
The route follows the novel from the eve of the Civil War through the depot and Five Points in the fall of Atlanta in 1864, and ends at the Margaret Mitchell House, where the book was written.
George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is set in Barcelona and on the Aragon front in 1937, from Alcubierre and the lines around Huesca to the May Days on La Rambla and Plaça de Catalunya. It is Orwell's account of fighting with the POUM militia, written from his own experience.
The route follows the book in order: the village where rifles are handed out, the siege lines at Huesca, the telephone exchange where the street fighting began, the rooftop on La Rambla and a quiet day in Barbastro.
Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017) was shot on the beach at Dunkirk itself, then on a Dutch lake off Urk, at Weymouth harbour and Swanage station in Dorset, and on a clifftop in California.
Five stops follow the soldiers' beach, the little boat that sets out from Weymouth, the pilot's cockpit and the train home. These are filming sites, so some pins mark the area rather than the exact spot.
Conan the Barbarian was filmed across Spain: the Cimmerian village at Valsaín, the Wheel of Pain near Solosancho, the witch's rocks at the Ciudad Encantada, and the deserts, dunes and salt marshes of Almería.
The Hyborian Age is invented; every stop here is a real place. The route follows the film from the raid on Conan's village to the Mountain of Power, and ends at Shepperton Studios in England, where an older King Conan speaks the closing lines.
Fallout 3 is set in the ruins of Washington, D.C., and its Capital Wasteland includes the Washington Monument, the National Mall, the National Archives and the Jefferson Memorial as places the player can explore. Bethesda's 2008 role-playing game takes place in 2277, 200 years after a nuclear war, and sends the Lone Wanderer across the real city and its Metro.
This route follows the main story from the first view of the Washington Monument to the Brotherhood's march on the Jefferson Memorial, taking in the Mall's trenches, the White House crater and the Archives' robot guardian. Raven Rock, the real Cold War bunker in Pennsylvania, is the Enclave's base, and the Broken Steel add-on ends the route at the Citadel inside the Pentagon.
Bayside Shakedown is set in Tokyo's fictional Wangan Precinct, and its real home is Odaiba: Fuji Television's headquarters, the island and the Rainbow Bridge that gives the second film its title.
The police comedy began on Fuji TV in 1997, the year the network moved to Odaiba, then a half-empty district. This route follows the show from the studio to Tokyo Teleport Station, the shot-in-Shiomi precinct and a Kyoto road junction that doubled for the bridge.
In September 1978, an 18-year-old photographer named Reza Shirazi comes home to Tehran and is pulled into the last days before Black Friday. The developers built the game from interviews with forty Iranians who lived through the revolution and from photographs by Michel Setboun; the streets, the cinema hideout and the prison are real places, filled with a fictional cast.
This route follows the game's 1978 story in order, from a Hasanabad rooftop to the shooting at Jaleh Square, then ends in the Evin Prison interrogation that frames the whole game. It is a route through the city the game recreates, not a walking itinerary.
inFAMOUS 2 builds New Marais from real New Orleans: the French Quarter, Bayou St. John, Oak Alley, Fort Jackson and the Lower Ninth Ward. Cole MacGrath flees ruined Empire City to a Louisiana city ruled by the demagogue Joseph Bertrand and needs a scientist, a device and power cores to beat the Beast.
New Marais is Sucker Punch's New Orleans: a fictional city assembled from the French Quarter, above-ground cemeteries, plantation houses, a Civil War fort, the bayous and the flooded districts left by a hurricane. This route follows Cole's story through seven of those stand-ins, from the swamp where he lands to the cathedral tower where the game ends.
In August 2010 a Bohemia Interactive team went to Lemnos to gather references, and came back with the material for Altis, the island where Arma 3 is set. Two years later two of the studio's developers were arrested on the same island and held for 129 days on suspicion of spying. After the arrest the game's main island, until then called Limnos, was renamed Altis; Stratis kept its name.
The route follows the real island from Myrina and its castle, past a church with no roof and a miniature desert, to the airport and the old Allied base at Moudros, then across the water to Agios Efstratios. Arma 3's war is set in 2034–2035; the harbours, theatre and dunes are not.
The Banshees of Inisherin's island is fictional, but the film was shot on two real ones: Inishmore, where Pádraic's cottage and the cliffs stand in for it, and Achill, where the pub, the shop, the lake and Colm's house were found. In April 1923, Colm stops speaking to his oldest friend, Pádraic.
This route follows the film's story from Pádraic's cottage to Colm's beach. Because Inisherin does not exist, every pin marks a real filming location; the sets at Cloughmore and Purteen are gone, and Colm's cottage is a private home to be seen from outside.
Gereon Rath arrives from Cologne in 1929 to a Berlin of police headquarters, cabarets and armed conspiracies. The series follows him and Charlotte Ritter from the May Day riots through the fall of the Weimar Republic to Hitler's first weeks in power, mixing real streets with sets and stand-ins.
This route visits the places the story names and the buildings that played them: the Rotes Rathaus as the police headquarters, the real Moka Efti, the Anhalter goods yard, the Hermannplatz U-Bahn, a Duisburg steelworks, the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, Schloss Drachenburg and the Volksbühne. Some stops are exact; others are stand-ins far from Berlin.
Every Far Cry game drops you into a country that does not exist, and almost every one was built from a real place. The developers camped on the savanna, sent a team to Nepal, spent two weeks in Montana and a month in Cuba.
This route follows the series in release order, one stop per game. Pins mark whole countries or regions, not scenes: they show where each fictional setting came from, and one entry has no sourced real model.
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.
