Four journeys that connect places on this site and that nobody has signposted.
The flight of 1704: Anandpur, the Sarsa crossing at Parivar Vichhora, Chamkaur Sahib, Machhiwara, Alamgir, Raikot, Dina Kangar, Khidrana at Muktsar. About two hundred and fifty kilometres and six weeks in the original, and a long day now.
The Grand Trunk Road serais: Sirhind, Doraha, Dakhni Sarai, Phillaur, Nurmahal, and the tombs at Nakodar just off it. Four Mughal buildings and a fort in a hundred kilometres on one road.
The First Anglo-Sikh War: Ferozepur, Mudki, Ferozeshah, Sobraon, with Hussainiwala at the river. Four battlefields inside a forty-kilometre triangle, none of them marked properly.
The Majha of the Gurus: Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Goindwal, Khadur Sahib, Baba Bakala, Dera Baba Nanak and the Kartarpur corridor. Two hundred years of the tradition's history in a circle of eighty kilometres.
None of these is a tourist route, none has interpretation, and each could be driven in a day.
Anybody who did one of them properly with a camera and a notebook would produce something that does not exist.
A fifth would be the water: Ropar headworks, Nangal, the face of the Bhakra dam, Harike where two rivers meet and the Rajasthan canal starts, Hussainiwala and the Ferozepur headworks. Nearly everything Punjab argues about is on that line and it is one day of driving.
A sixth would be what is gone: the mounds at Sirhind, the stupa at Sanghol, the Harappan levels at Rupnagar, the hill at Lohgarh, the bunga sites at Amritsar. A day spent on the places where something used to be is a different kind of route and it would be the hardest of the six to guide.
The colonial route runs the Grand Trunk Road with its serais and kos minars, and the canal route runs the headworks and the rest houses. None of the four is signed as a route anywhere.