Michael Wood sets out to test four legends against the historical record: Shangri-La, the Golden Fleece, the Queen of Sheba, and King Arthur. Across four episodes he travels to the places each myth claims as its own, climbing into the mountains of Tibet to trace the roots of the Shangri-La story, following the Black Sea coast associated with Jason's quest, and crossing Ethiopia to examine the trade routes said to have carried the Queen of Sheba's wealth to Solomon's Jerusalem. For Arthur, Wood turns to the political chaos of post-Roman Britain, reading the legend as a response to real warfare rather than pure invention. He interviews local historians and archaeologists at each stop and weighs textual evidence against the landscape itself, asking how much of a myth's staying power comes from geography and how much from what people needed to believe. The series treats each story as a puzzle with partial answers, connecting the Sheba legend to ancient commerce and the Arthur legend to the collapse of Roman authority rather than leaving either as folklore.