The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

One of the keys to navigating with nature is appreciating scale. It is vital that we do not spend too much time focusing too narrowly or widely. In this photograph, taken in the South Downs on Monday, our eyes are naturally led to the fallen tree. It would be very easy to miss both a bigger clue to direction and a smaller one.

The heart of the tree is marginally closer to our side of the tree, which hints that we are south of it, looking north.

If we peer through the undergrowth and bare tree branches we can see that the land falls away to lower country in the distance. The South Downs are a predominantly east/west range of hills and so any time that we can see a long way down into lower land it suggests that we are looking north or south. The hills are also close to the…

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Recovering from a full and fun day filming with Jules Hudson and the team from the BBC’s Countryfile program. We were out on the South Downs and I spent the first two-thirds of the day teaching Jules some of the methods for navigating using nature and then ‘released him into the wild’ with a tricky challenge. If you’d like to know whether Jules managed to find his way using nature then it is being shown on BBC1 this Sunday evening (03 May) at 7.30pm.

I learnt plenty on the day too, Jules was an archaeologist by trade and a passionate historian, before becoming a presenter and his view of the landscape is similarly analytical to mine, but his senses are used to scouring for slightly different details. I learnt about how Wellington used to read the land in front of him, about hill forts and burial methods amongst many other things.

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The rape flowers are coming into bloom over the South Downs, but they don’t all bloom at the same time.

The crop tends to be on a field that will get a good amount of sunlight anyway, often south-facing, but even within the fields there are subtle shade differences. The flowers tend to appear first in the south-facing dips in the land. This is probably because they are getting plenty of sun, but being sheltered from the cooling winds. As a general rule, nature moves faster the warmer things are.

I was up early this morning and caught a great twilight show from Jupiter and Venus. This photo does not do Venus justice, but you might just be able to make it out in the centre of the picture between the two banks of cloud.

Jupiter’s orbit is outside earth’s and so moves through the night sky quite slowly, about one constellation per year.

Venus’ orbit is closer to the sun than ours and so its position in the sky changes quite rapidly. It spends about seven months as a bright object in the early evening sky, before disappearing behind the sun’s glare for about four months and then re-emerging in the early morning for seven months. It then repeats the cycle. Ancient civilisations were divided in their understanding of it, some realising that it is a planet and others giving it two labels, ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’, without realising they…

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Most of my family and friends are aware how much attention I like to give to the journey, as opposed to focusing solely on the destination. They may not be aware that I also harbour two strong interests in Homer’s, Odyssey, for the enjoyment it brings and also the clues to ancient navigation methods. At one stage Odysseus has to keep the Bear constellation, Arctos, on his left to hold his course.

I was delighted this morning to find an email from my sister-in-law drawing my attention to this wonderful poem, Ithaca. It was written by the Greek poet, Constantine P. Cavafy, one hundred years ago. It is weighs in heavily on the side of enjoying a journey, which is quite ironic given that it is inspired by The Odyssey, an epic poem about a man who was trying desperately to bring his journey to a close.

(I don’ t think I’ll…

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It’s 8.15am this morning out on the Downs and this sheep’s shadow tells us that we are looking south. Her wool, or ’sheep fur’ as some would have it, is blowing from the same direction as the sun and gave me a constant reference all morning.

On a completely unrelated note, there is an article about the RGS in today’s Telegraph that I have somehow appeared in.

This morning’s sun was a strong enough clue, but if we wanted to know which way was southeast then these aircraft contrails are pointing the way to the continent.

It looks like a particularly busy morning for aircraft, but this is just a reflection of atmospheric conditions. The hydrogen-rich jet fuel has mixed with oxygen, reacted in the engines and formed, among lots of other lovely and not so lovely things, water. In certain temperatures and humidity levels this water freezes into ice crystals. The high cirrus clouds that we normally see are also composed entirely of ice.

The length of time that a contrail survives depends on the humidity, if the air is dry it will sublimate away, but if saturated they will last as long as other cirrus clouds.

I can remember sitting at a restaurant in the small and perfectly formed fishing village of Trehiguier in southern Brittany last July. I had my back to the sun, which was setting behind the row of houses behind me. I watched the crisp edge of a chimney corner move upwards and to the right as the sun slipped down and to the left behind me. My poor wife had to watch me gauging the sun with a fist and then outstretched fingers and then listen to me predict when the chimney shadow would reach our table.

Last night my wife was spared such ordeals as I was working outside, in a small patch of woodland. I watched the sun’s light moving up the trees in front of me. Unlike the crisp edges of the chimney shadow, the edges were blended. The shadows were moving upwards but not following discrete lines. The…

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This isn’t about the Force, although I did read recently that a lot of Scottish policemen have put ‘Jedi’ down as their religion on their work forms.

More days than not I spot an example of the sun influencing nature in a way that is new to me in some way. In general terms it is fairly old news that a place that receives no direct sunlight will appear different in some way. It is in the detail that the novelty is to be found. The more obvious signs might be that it has different plants growing and an abundance of mosses and lichens.

The more fascinating signs are subtler, created by factors that are minute but combine to create an effect. The first picture shows how broadbrush nature can be. Despite looking in one direction towards a single hillside, as many as six different bands of colour are visible.

The second picture…

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Possibly the worst blog post title that I have yet come up with, and there have been a few…

Our cat, Murphy, can be seen reflecting the direction of the last of the suns rays here.

The tree shadows in the distance have broken free from the woodland in the background too for the first time this year at sunset.

In the spirit of randomness to which this posting has succumbed I thought you might like this puzzle, set by a friend and former NN alumni.

Do not be alarmed if my postings continue to be sporadic, poorly constructed, lacking in theme, good titles, concise argument or beautiful short sentences. Most of that energy is being directed into the book at the moment.