Walk Frankenstein, Geneva to the Orkneys
Victor Frankenstein has promised his creature a companion, and he can't bear to build her at home. Your everyday steps follow him across Europe to a rock in the North Sea, and Mary Shelley's words unlock on the way.
- 1,426 miles
- 7 stops
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818
A long way to go to keep a promise
Victor Frankenstein owes his creation a bride. To build her, he leaves Switzerland for a remote rock in the North Sea, dragging his friend Clerval along. Fourteen hundred miles of guilt, delay, and a monster secretly following every step of the way.
This is the journey from the second half of the novel. Victor leaves Geneva with his friend Clerval, goes down the Rhine by Strasbourg to Rotterdam, crosses to London, and spends months in England. They go on through Oxford and the Peak District to Edinburgh, and then he leaves Clerval behind and goes on alone to a hut in the Orkneys, to work where nobody can see. The creature follows them the whole way.
Mary Shelley began the book in 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, during the ghost-story contest with Byron and Percy Shelley, and she had travelled down the Rhine herself two years earlier. The places are real, and Bematist walks all 1,426 miles of them.
- Distance
- 1,426 miles (2,295 km)
- Stops
- 7, each with its own passage and plate
- Map
- The real world, on Apple Maps
- Text
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Project Gutenberg ebook #84
Where it starts
I packed up my chemical instruments and the materials I had collected, resolving to finish my labours in some obscure nook in the northern highlands of Scotland.
Frankenstein · Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
This is the passage Bematist gives you the moment you set out. The other 6 wait at the places they happened, and the only way to read them is to walk there.
How long would Frankenstein take you?
Victor delays for months. You don't have to. Choose when you'd like to reach the Orkneys and Bematist sets the pace from how much you already walk.
A rough guide, at about 0.75 m a step. In the app the pace comes from your own 30-day average in Apple Health, and stays fixed for the whole journey.
On the way
The words, at the places
7 passages, each waiting where it happened. You can see how far away the next one is, but not what it says.
Walk it with friends
Send a link and walk the same road together, each of you on your own streets, wherever you live.
No streak to lose
Steps come straight from Apple Health. A quiet day is just a short one, and your place on the road only moves forward.
More roads like this one
See the whole library, with a new book every month, chosen by walkers' vote.
Set out for the Orkneys.
1,426 miles of Frankenstein, on the walks you already take.
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