waypost

plural wayposts

1. A sign or other marker that indicates the way along a road or trail.

   Every few hundred yards on alternate sides of the route, a wooden waypost about a yard high was set into the ground.

   1991, Norman Rush, Mating

2. figurativelySomething that guides or marks the way along a figurative journey; a temporary stopping point.

   As society evolves, education must change to keep apace with it, so may this text serve as a waypost, not a goal.

   1922, Jane Wright McKee, Purposeful handwork

   1 more example

   The war makes many oblique appearances in a work which, despite its saturation with traditional images, is regarded as a waypost of artistic modernism because of its fashionable anthropological references, jazz-like rhythms and random snatches of the pulsing city's polyphonic argot.

   2008, Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Terror, page 13