Assassin's Creed Valhalla: Chasing the Order in England

Grantebridge is the first English town Eivor fights into, and it belongs to Soma, the jarlskona who lost it: with Eivor's help she takes the town back from the Order of the Ancients. The name is honest history — the Anglo-Saxon settlement here was called Grantebrycge, "Granta bridge", and Cambridge was already an important trading centre in the Roman and Viking eras. Vikings really did winter here too: after leaving Repton, one band of the Great Heathen Army made Cambridge its base in 874–875. In the Viking period the centre of town moved off Castle Hill down to the riverside Quayside.

Location precision: Valhalla's Grantebridge is a Viking-age version of the town; the pin marks the Quayside, the riverside area Wikipedia names as the town's Viking-period centre.

Visitor guidance: Quayside is the riverside below Castle Hill in central Cambridge, where the town shifted in the Viking period.

Jorvik is one of the regions Eivor can take on after pledging to help Hytham rid England of the Order, and the city is home to a group of Order members whom the main quests set out to find and eliminate. Eivor first meets Abbess Ingeborg in the city's archives; only later is her identity revealed. The real Vikings captured York in 866, renamed it from Eoforwic to Jorvik and made it the capital of Viking territory in Britain — more than 10,000 people at its peak, with its own mint and craft workshops around Coppergate. The Jórvík Viking Centre, opened in 1984, stands where timber buildings of that city were excavated.

Location precision: The game's Jorvik is the whole Viking city; the pin marks the Jórvík Viking Centre, built over the excavated timber buildings.

Visitor guidance: The Jórvík Viking Centre is in central York, off Coppergate, built over the excavated timber buildings of the Viking city.

One of the Order's targets, Gunilla, is waiting at Repton's docks: Odin's Sight picks her out, sitting down near the river. The real Repton has a Viking story of its own. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that in 873–874 the Great Heathen Army overwintered here, and St Wystan's church stands on the site of the 9th-century Anglo-Saxon monastery and church. Excavators found a mass grave there, with a large stone coffin in its middle. The church today is famous for its Anglo-Saxon crypt, the burial place of two Mercian kings.

Location precision: The game spreads its Order targets over Repton's docks and river; the pin marks St Wystan's Church, on the site of the monastery where the Great Heathen Army wintered in 873–874.

Visitor guidance: St Wystan's Church is in the village of Repton, Derbyshire.

Wincestre is Alfred's city and a base of the Order inside it. Fulke, an Order agent serving the king of Wessex, captures Sigurd and tortures him, removing his right arm,, convinced the young Viking is an Isu or descended from one. A key Alfred gives Eivor opens a door in the Old Minster. Alfred was rebuilding Winchester in exactly these years: the Roman street plan wiped out for a grid built to hold off Vikings, the old stone walls repaired and ditches dug — the largest of his burhs.

Location precision: The game's Wincestre is the whole Saxon city; the pin marks Winchester Cathedral, beside the footprint of the Old Minster that the last Order key opens.

Visitor guidance: The plan of the earlier Old Minster is laid out in the grass adjoining Winchester Cathedral.

Eivor and her allies join Guthrum's assault on Wessex and break Alfred's forces at Chippenham; for a few weeks the Vikings hold most of Wessex. The fight Eivor takes part in is the battle recorded in January 878 between Guthrum's Viking army and Alfred's Anglo-Saxons, and what caught the king out was his own absence: he was wintering at Chippenham without his army and had to run for Athelney. No source records the ground the two armies met on.

Location precision: No source records where the battle was fought; the pin marks the town of Chippenham, Wiltshire.

Visitor guidance: Chippenham is a town in Wiltshire; the site of the 878 battle is not recorded.

The last stop is a bread oven in a backwater. Eivor is sent to a village in north-west Hamtunscire that the game calls Aethelnay, to meet the informant known only as the Poor Fellow-Soldier of Christ — the man whose tip-offs have led her to Order members all over England. He is King Alfred, baking bread in anonymous exile, and he explains that he took the title Grand Maegester of the Order only to destroy it from inside. Eivor lets him live and rides home to a hero's welcome. The real Athelney is the island in the Somerset Levels where Alfred hid from the Viking army before Edington.

Location precision: The game places its Aethelnay in the Hampshire shire; the pin marks Athelney in the Somerset Levels, the island fort where Alfred hid in 878, whose name the game's village shares.

Visitor guidance: Athelney lies between Burrowbridge and East Lyng in Somerset, in the Levels that once made it an island.