The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

No, I have not let my 3-year-old loose on the keyboard.

‘Guugu Yimithirr’ is an Australian aboriginal language of the Guugu Yimithirr people of Far North Queensland. The highlight of my week may well be coming across an article about it in the New York Times. (Thank you, Tom Vanderbilt, for the great tip off.)

Why the joy?

Guugu Yimithirr is an extremely space conscious language and its speakers do not refer to the position of things relative to themselves, but relative to the cardinal points. It is always turn east or west, not left or right. Always ‘pass the salt, its just to the north of you’, not ‘it is under your nose’. This constant ‘cardinal awareness’ means that speakers of Guugu Yimithirr must remain aware of directional clues at all times, even if this is just the layout of their village, but it also means that they experience the world in a…

Read More...

Tom Vanderbilt, the journalist and best-selling author of ‘Traffic‘, flew over from the States to join me in Dartmoor last week for a taste of natural navigation in the wild.

His account will be appearing in the US magazine, ‘Outside‘, in due course so I won’t spoil the fun here, but I will write it up and publish it on this website once Tom’s Outside article has run. Suffice to say that Dartmoor did not pull any punches and a meteorologically intense time was enjoyed.

The Natural Navigator book is being published in the US on 1st January 2011.

I have just spent a couple of nights living in the beautiful, but spartan, Archirondel Tower, a Martello tower on the east coast of Jersey in the Channel Islands. Built in 1792, it was extensively ‘refurbished’ by the occupying Nazis in 1941. A swastika and date are still very easy to find on the inside of the tower.

My father-in-law and I took great pleasure in resting on the ramparts and identifying the navigational marks out at sea, using a pair of binoculars. ‘There, I have the Giffard Port marker!’ One of us would cry as the waves pounded at the rocks below and their mist mixed with the smoke rising up from the freshly caught mackerel on the BBQ at our feet. The red and white stripes of the tower are themselves an aid to navigation, easily identified by shipping near and far.

For the two days we were living in…

Read More...

I was at the Goodwood Vintage Festival last night. We saw Ronnie Wood and his band, The Faces, as well as The Wailers. When the moody clouds passed, I couldn’t help glancing up at the Plough, Arcturus, Cassiopeia, Perseus and Jupiter rising in the east. Even managed to catch a couple of great Perseid meteors, one of which burnt a smoky trail across the sky, visible above the bright lights of the Big Wheel. Vintage.

I have a rule that I write for an hour each morning before doing anything else. No distractions or procrastinating allowed. No pottering, no early breakfasting and definitely no Internet browsing or checking emails. I used to be able to spend this hour indoors, but the kids are now at an age where it is easier to escape to a shed at the end of the garden.

Standing and taking in the dawn for a few moments this morning it felt like a rule that was in need of a little breaking. I stood there in my standard uniform for this time of day: pyjamas, Ugg boots, thermal jumper and hat. Quarter of an hour must have passed. Naughty, naughty boy! Get in that shed at once!

Yesterday I was honoured to spend a day with TGO magazine’s new editor, Emily Rodway. She joined me for a day in my backyard, the South Downs, and we left the compass and map in the rucksack and headed out into the hills.

For those who don’t yet know TGO (formerly The Great Outdoors), it is the magazine for independent hillwalkers and backpackers. It has a loyal and very knowledgable readership and Emily has just taken over at the editor’s desk from Cameron McNeish after his near-two-decade reign. Cameron moves on to the ‘Editor-at-Large’ role.

TGO includes amongst its stable of contributors writers like Jim Perrin, and so it is fair to say that it is considered a cut above mainstream.

Challenging and exciting times for Emily and I wish her the best at this great walking institution.

On a Country Navigator course on Saturday, I was asked a question that I get asked quite regularly:

“What sort of people come on your courses?”

It is both an easy and difficult question to answer. The difficult part is that the backgrounds of those who have an interest in natural navigation is extremely diverse. It is tempting to say that it could not be more diverse, but that is not true; by the time someone finds themselves on one of my courses they have selected themselves as someone who can reach the UK (typically) and also someone who either is willing and able to spend some income on a rare skill or is close to someone who is willing to do that for them as a present. Put another, more flippant way, I don’t get many subsistence farmers from Africa or Asia on my courses.

It is fair however to say that…

Read More...

My thanks to William Goble for bringing my attention to a extraordinary piece of navigation history.

Although standard practice in aerial navigation at the time, it is now remarkable to consider that the most powerful weapon in the history of warfare was guided using the stars. The Enola Gay dropped its atomic bomb payload on Hiroshima after an 1800 mile flight where the aircraft’s position was checked using the stars. From the Guardian article:

‘Van Kirk’s role was navigator: “We did things the old-fashioned way: celestial navigation, telling your position by the stars. We had a dome up top of the plane to sit up in and shoot the stars with a bubble sextant.”

The full article can be read in the Guardian Online.

I returned from a family trip to Brittany yesterday and what better welcome back than to come downstairs this morning to find Jupiter beaming at me through a skylight. It is a firm fixture in the early morning sky now and consequently is being confused by many for Venus. If a bright white object is visible when it is too light to see many stars then you are likely looking at Jupiter or Venus, and if the sun is more than fifty degrees away (five extended fist-widths) then that narrows it to Jupiter. This is an exercise you only need to do irregularly since it will appear in the same part of the sky at the same time for many days.

Since Venus is relatively close to the sun and is only visible as a bright object when the sun is below the horizon, it follows that Venus is normally seen…

Read More...

Welcome to all New York Times readers. You have successfully navigated your way to the home of natural navigation on the Internet. Enjoy a wander through these pages, or, if you prefer the feel of paper in your hands, check out my book, The Natural Navigator. It is being published in the US in January.

If you are not a NYT reader, but would like to be then my natural navigation article can be found here.