The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Another frosty morning and the birds seem particularly active. Whenever I see dark birds in a cold setting I am reminded of the Raven-Floki tale.

Floki Vilgerdarson was a Norwegian Viking and one of the first of his countrymen to set foot on Iceland. One method he used of wayfinding was to take ravens with him and then release them. By watching their behaviour, Floki was able to divine the proximity and direction of land.

According to legend, he released three birds, the first went nowhere, the second took off and then returned to his ship, but the third raven flew on ahead. Floki followed this raven and found the cold island he had set out for. After settling there, Floki climbed to the top of a mountain from where he could see a fjord filled with ice on the other side. He gave the new land a name, ‘Isafjordur’, which became…

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Yesterday afternoon I was driving back home from Chichester when the car took over and lead me to the West Stoke car park. This wild places book has had a bewitching effect. Was it a case of many a true word spoken in jest in my entry yesterday? I really did not expect to find myself at Kingley Vale, one of the nominated ‘wild places’, as soon as a few hours after writing it.

Walking for a couple of hours from sunlight to dusk and beyond, there were plenty of rich natural navigation clues and I studied them briefly and took pictures that will appear in this blog over time, but yesterday was not really about navigating. Sometimes when studying anything with nature at its heart it feels important to leave the cerebral, academic hat at home and just wonder. My frost-rich walk yesterday was one of those times. The path led…

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A Christmas present that I hesitate to share, or even share the idea of… is ‘Britain and Ireland’s Best Wild Places’ book. It does exactly what it says on the tin and in an appetising way.

Try this paragraph for size:

‘Nothing grows in the shadow of the yews. They preside over empty, shady slopes of flint chalk and their own tindery flakings and droppings. Druids worshipped them and armourers harvested them, but nothing can live with them.’

Before you sigh and mutter that this book will threaten the few remaining wild places, and that my blogging about it isn’t helping much either… fear not, I have a plan. Perhaps we could all agree to buy the book, read it and then not visit any of the places in it, satisfying ourselves instead in a cathartic way by just daydreaming of expanses of wonderful wildness? Or, as the collective will collapses, maybe we…

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There is an extraordinary story in today’s Times. A blind man has navigated his way around an obstacle course without using touch, using a skill known as ‘blindsight’.

Today is the winter solstice. I would love to give you a long blog entry, but unfortunately this is not possible as I am too busy erecting stones, slaughtering animals, lighting fires, celebrating births and rebirths, feasting, pouring water over heads and the rest. Enjoy.

On Monday night I gave my lecture, ‘Travel and Exploration: a new direction?’ to the Royal Geographical Society. I really enjoyed it, but with about five hundred people in the audience it was fun in a pulse-quickening kind of way. It is time for a little confession.

Last Friday was a full moon and no ordinary full moon either. It was a perigee full moon, when the moon passes closest to the earth and appears a lot larger than normal. On Friday evening it was due to be the largest full moon that we had seen for 50 years. There were also due to be meteors from the Germinid showers.

I am not generally a hugely superstitious creature, although I do enjoy reading about the historical and cultural associations surrounding sky omens. At the end of last week it was easier for me to see how these connections and beliefs have evolved.…

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My camera ventured out with me for a short run this morning, I was feeling confident that I might spot some attractive frost patterns in the trees and hills. The thing that stopped me abrubtly however was less… how shall I put it? Less classically beautiful perhaps… less aesthetically pleasing certainly. I had been taking a shortcut through a patch of woodland, when I noticed something incongruous. The ivy floor of the wood looked unusual. On one side of a young beech tree there were ivy leaves thickly flecked with white bird droppings. Great big dollops of them.

On my courses I encourage people to avoid relying too heavily on memorised ‘tricks’ and instead to try to remember principles. This was a good example. There was no ‘bird poo trick’ that I was aware of, but there is a solid principle. Trees like sunlight and their branches like to grow towards…

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This picture was taken yesterday morning. The frost line on the top of my Land Rover runs close to a north-south line.

The morning sun has risen in the southeast and warmed the eastern driver’s side and southern rear of the car. The warming from the larger driver’s side is having a greater effect, which is why the main frost line is north-south.

Venus and Jupiter will be hanging low in the southwestern sky shortly after dusk over the coming days. A solitary planet that is not expected is often confused with a bright star, but when two appear together the effect is too foreign for that. Even those unfamiliar with the night sky tend to get a feeling of other-worldliness.

Venus is much the brighter of the two, the brightest of all celestial objects after the sun and moon, and will be the first thing that can be seen in the night sky as the sun sets. Venus is so bright that it is in theory possible to see shadows from it on a clear moonless night, but light pollution in the UK sadly makes that very unlikely here. This screen shot is from some excellent software called ‘Stellarium’, which can be downloaded from here. It shows the southwestern sky as it will…

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If someone had casually asked me to draw up a list of the people I was most likely to use as sources for my blogging over the coming week there would have been some predictable names. Nowhere in the top ten thousand names would the words ‘Nigella’ or ‘Lawson’ have appeared together. Regular blog readers will know how much I enjoy understanding the connection between phenomena such as the earth’s orbit around the sun and our daily lives. Christmas is such a time and, almost unbelievably, this is where we hand over to Nigella in her Christmas cookbook,

‘Biblical scholars generally tend to believe that Christ’s birth probably fell about six months after Passover, which would make it nearer September than December. However, the Roman Festival of Saturnalia – a time of merry-making, excess and misrule, precursor to the office party and much else besides – fell around the middle of…

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