I should get a chance to blog in more detail in time, but for now I just wanted to share a couple of nice clues I found in the light snow and ice I walked amongst.

The first photo shows the first snow I encountered on a climb out of the Vale of Ewyas. We are looking east in this picture, the only snow to have survived the thawing warmth of the day are the thin strips hiding in the shade on the south side of the path. This technique is analogous to the one using puddles on the south side of west-east tracks.

The sunlight can be seen lighting the hillside in the background and unsurprisingly there is little snow to be found there. It is only in the shadows that it survives on the lower slopes.

On reaching the ridge and the Offa’s Dyke Path, the snow and ice were a little more abundant. In the photos below, notice how there are lines in the ice, sculpted by the wind. These lines proved consistent over the local area.

As so often seems to be the case, a short stroll from the mainstream channels uncovered rough diamonds.

In the programme, an aerial shot showed us clearly visible patterns in the earth, patterns that were partly concealed at ground level by dense undergrowth. The narrator explained that we were looking at ‘geoglyphs’ in the Amazon rainforest. Geoglyphs are shapes that have been deliberately formed in the land by the hand of man.

Like many pilots, I have come to love the way it is possible in the air to spot patterns in the earth that are hard to notice on the ground. Lines that are lost in their surroundings on terra firma, stand out luminously from 3000 feet. But my experience has been restricted to European Iron Age Hill Forts and the like. This was definitely new territory.

In the Amazon there are ‘negative’ geoglyphs, formed by digging ditches, often up to 4m deep – ‘negative’ only in the sense that something has been removed. In other parts to the world there are positive geoglyphs where shapes are formed by building up from the ground, using stones or similar.

You can imagine that my ears pricked more than a little when the anthropologist being interviewed, explained that the hundreds of shapes they had found in the Amazon were mostly aligned north-south. A little light digging of my own revealed this to be a far-from isolated example, many of the worlds geoglyphs are aligned with the cardinal points.

This is definitely not coincidental. The most likely explanation for geoglyphs, even when the exact explanation is elusive – as in the Amazon, is that there is a religious/spiritual explanation for these mammoth land sculptures. Once more there is the temptation to ask the question: “How did these old and technologically-basic civilisations manage to create architecture on near-perfect north-south lines.” This question is quite natural, but it is to misunderstand one important part of the ancient world: the sky.

Historically, most divine worship has looked upwards and outwards at least a little. The sky forms part of many ancient cultures’ creeds. From here it is simply a case of realising that the way the sky appears to behave and the directions we know as north, south, east and west and just two sides of the same coin. Anyone who spends time admiring the patterns in the day and night sky will come to know north, south, east and west, even if they use different words, because these are labels for the changes we see in the sky. East and west are the average directions of sunrise and sunset, wherever you are in the world, and north and south are the anchors of the night sky – the only two places where the stars cease their restlestness, the world over.

In the picture above we are looking at a geoglyph called the Paracas Candalabra in Chile. It is aligned almost perfectly north-south and can be seen from miles out to sea. There are a few more very good examples of geoglyphs here.

A False Temptation

I cover the idea above from a similar angle in my book, The Natural Navigator:

“There is sometimes a temptation to think that this is all a remarkable coincidence: how extraordinary that the sun should happen to sit neatly on certain lines, like north or south, at certain times, or that it should happen to rise exactly east or set west at others. It is, however, a false temptation, because the cardinal directions and the motion of celestial objects, including the sun, are just different ways of looking at the same thing…”

The astronomical explanations for all of the above can be found in the simple, and yet rich and revealing, revolution of the Earth on its axis and its orbit around the sun. Geoglpyhs are aligned with respect to the axis of the Earth’s rotation. Not because its architects were aware of such a motion, but because the sky betrays it.

In this photo of a dog-mauled football, we are looking southeast. But why does the football’s shadow appear longer than the patch of frost? Surely, since the sun is rising it should be the other way round?

Useless clue: it doesn’t have anything to do with the dog, who wisely avoids footballs until they are well defrosted.

UPDATE: The patterns of frost we see as the day wears on are shaped by more than one factor.

The areas that have received direct sunlight will of course thaw faster than those that remain in the shade.

The colour of a surface has a huge effect too. Dark earth will thaw faster in the sun than light-coloured stone.

The wind also has a big impact on any day with a light breeze or greater. The air the breeze brings will normally be warmer than the ground that has frozen overnight thanks to the heat that has radiated up during the cold night. This warmer air will thaw places according to their exposure. The next time you are in an airliner crossing over snow-covered mountains notice that the lower limit of the snow, the snowline, is not a perfectly straight line. It undulates. It will typically be slightly higher on the southern side, where the sun can warm the ground, but even on one side the line will move up and down according to gradient, the shape of the land and the prevailing wind direction. Where a valley aligns with the prevailing wind direction, its snowline is often noticeably higher as the snow has thawed to a higher level than the surrounding ones.

In the picture above the small patch of grass that has thawed just to the right of the football’s shadow tip has lost its frost because it is marginally higher than the surrounding grass. The sun may have found it easier to reach this patch, but it is also because the warmer air of the day has already found this grass. The warmer air and sun have failed to melt the frost of the grass that is a few centimetres away because it lies a little lower.

By mid-morning the grass is often a patchwork quilt of frost and green, a mixture of areas that have received direct sunlight or warmer air and those that have not. There are clues to direction in these frost shadows, even when the sun has hidden, and a lot more besides.

Congratulations Sim on taking this fantastic photograph and allowing me to share it and thanks Mark for sending it my way.

To celebrate this great pic, I thought a little quiz would be fun. Or to be more precise, several shades of the same question…

To make this more interesting I’m going to give you the opportunity to test yourselves at the level you feel most comfortable with. Anyone who has been on my Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course or read The Natural Navigator book, should be able to crack this at one level at least.

Depending on your level of confidence try one of the questions below, A is very difficult, B slightly easier etc. (Don’t read them all first though as there are clues in B, C and D which make it a little easier.)

A) Just by studying this photograph, can you work out which way we are looking in this photo and the latitude the picture was taken at?

B) The photograph was taken in the northern hemisphere. Can you work out which way we are looking in this photo and the latitude the picture was taken?

B) The photograph was taken on the east coast of Masirah Island, Oman, latitude 20 degrees north, what direction are we looking in the picture?

D) The picture was taken on the east coast of Masirah Island, Oman, latitude 20 degrees north. During the time lapse needed to take the photograph the stars rotated clockwise. What direction are we looking in the picture?

Answers by email or Twitter. No prizes other than honour and glory, of sorts

A big thank you to Sim and Mark, for respectively having taken this picture and sending it my way. It’s a cracker and deserves to win an award in my opinion. I’m not the sort of person to sit back and wait for other people to realise that an award should be given to someone, so I hereby award Sim with the inaugural The Natural Navigator Astronomical Photograph of the Year award 2011!

UPDATE:

Look away now if you don’t want the answer yet…

We are looking SSE. The south celestial pole is to just below the bottom right of the picture. The stars we are looking at are those between Achernar (bright streak on right) and the constellation Lepus (left of picture). Well done to all who got it.

If you want to see some pretty thorough workings, then this is not a bad place to find them:

http://thisteacherslife.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/seeing-stars/

I do not share everything in this blog, you will be pleased to know. Most matters familial and ablutionary are kept from these pages.

So too are exact locations from time to time. It is not usually necessary to pinpoint the precise spot where a natural navigation technique revealed itself, or to give a 16 figure grid reference of the perch from which a photograph was taken.

Sometimes, I must confess that I deliberately fail, as unostentatiously as possible, to reveal even a general location if I am keen not to encourage visitors for any reason. This is rare, but it does happen. I have walked on certain routes in the Lake District and felt guilty for having let my boots join the millions of others that etch too deeply into these rocks at times. The guilt would worsen if I then added in any way to the numbers who walked the exact same path.

On occasion a place I find is magical because of its remote, untouched nature. Then I feel conflicted. I try very hard to make sure that there is genuine value in my blog, that it reveals not just natural navigation observations and techniques, but also shares wherever possible the broader joys of the outdoors and where these are to be found.

I have just returned from a short family break in the Vale of Ewyas in the Black Mountains. However aware I am that we were not the first to visit or discover this corner of the Brecon Beacons National Park, shock may not have registered on my face if a shepherd had appeared from behind a rocky outcrop and announced that we were the first to visit the valley in a hundred years.

This is a place that has been carelessly and wonderfully overlooked by modernity. As if to add a piquancy to the natural wonders of the Llanthony Valley as it is also known, mobile telephone signals have failed to penetrate the land. Not even TV signals can bulldoze their way through the high rock fortresses on either side.

The place has drawn monastics, writers, artists, recluses and rebels of every flavour for centuries. And in fitting testimony to the wildness of this place, it spits them all out again. Even those who, like the designer Eric Gill, came to get away from  ‘men of business’ find that it is altogether too remote and run back to milder wilderness, their reclusive tails tucked between their legs. The few that stay are eccentric, and if not tinged with madness when they moved there, then they guard against its onset for sure.

A thin and at times testing road runs up through the village of Llanthony, with its 12th Century Priory, heading northwest towards the town of books, Hay-on-Wye. Either side of this tarmac that has a weak grip on the green, is a valley that sighs in the face of anyone who dares bring the slightest urbanity with them. It is a place that challenges, a place that inspires. Bruce Chatwin was a convert and based his novel, On the Black Hill, here. If you have ever wrestled with writing poetry, if you have ever stared within and asked if you are truly a poet and been tortured by that simple question, then this is the place to head. You will know shortly after arriving and be able to answer the question with authority by dusk.

If you are more content to sense than create and you go seeking natural wonders, you will soon find it is impossible to take a big enough mental basket. It will overflow with observations before you have actively sought any.

Natural navigators will find the valley teeming with clues. In the dawn photograph above we are looking northwest. This perspective gives us a chance to appreciate one of the most beautiful clues, albeit one that is sketched out with one of nature’s broader brushes.

Natural navigation is dominated by an interest in finding direction, it is both the amuse-bouche and sirloin steak of the subject, but there are many navigational delights that do not concern themselves with compass points.

We can garner an understanding of our altitude from the life we find around us.

In the view above we get a chance to witness how the plant life changes with altitude. Deciduous woodland in the valley bottom surrenders to hardier pines. At the treeline the pines give way to the rust of winter’s bracken. Looking higher still only the hardiest of plants, lead by the grasses, will be found. The plants themselves shrink as the rock of the mountain forces its way higher into the more violent winds and more determined snows.

These are the clues to our height that are easiest to take in from a distance before we head up the hills themselves and risk failing to see the wood for the trees.

There was a temptation for me to fail to mention the Vale of Ewyas at all. There are many who would prefer me not to whisper its secrets. However, three things made me happy to share it. They are all related.

Some places are stronger than us folk. The Vale of Ewyas I hope and believe is one of them. If it is not and it ever needs help in its defence, then its chances are better if at least a few have fresh memories of it. Finally, this is a blog and blogs that fail to let slip the odd secret are not worth their electronic ink!

This is the best wild place I’ve ever been to that is relatively easy to get to.

Addendum:

The rather poor and poorly-focused photograph below was taken a couple of days before the one above. Notice how there is still a tiny and thin band of snow high on the northeastern side of the distant mountain, but none elsewhere. Such places are teeming with clues.

Here’s an interesting solstice fact for you: the Earth is actually receiving more solar radiation at this time of year than at any other time. This is because the Earth does not orbit the sun in a circle, but in an ellipse. In the northern hemisphere winter the Earth is at its closest to the sun, a point called ‘perihelion’, but in summer it is at its furthest point, or ‘aphelion’.

The Guardian have published a little article on the timing of the winter solstice.

However, my favourite solstice image is on a different page. The same technique used in the photo on that page, from the same position, but on the summer solstice would probably not catch the sun at all, or perhaps just a glimpse of it in the top corners.

At this time of year the sun is always lower at any time of day than it would be in the summer. This means the number of times when it is out of sight is also much greater. In one sense, of course, the sun is out of sight when it is nighttime – I always like to think of the sun being due north at midnight, even though it is underground. But there are many times when it is not night, but the sun is still so low that it is hard to find.

At the start of end of the day the sun will often hide behind clouds, buildings, woodland etc. Even in the middle of the day it will still be a full 47 degrees lower in the sky than in late June. That is to say you could fit almost five outstretched fists between the two solstice suns at midday, one on top of the other.

The fact that the sun is lower and there are more clouds in winter make it a good idea to remain aware of a simple technique. It is the sort of thing that when you think about it, it seems ridiculously obvious, yet it is easy to not consider it at all.

Clouds can act as a mirror, much in the way the moon does, and reveal the approximate direction of the sun. In the image above, which I took a few days ago, the sun has long since abandoned the surrounding land. It would be all too easy to imagine that it was lost as a source of direction-finding altogether. However, if you look at the clouds they are pointing the general direction of the sun for us, it is to the right of the picture. Since this was taken in the afternoon, the sun will be in the southwestern part of the sky and so we must be looking in a southerly direction.

If you are lucky you can find clouds in more than one direction that are lit on one side, sometimes a collection of mirrors forms that allow you to pinpoint the sun fairly accurately, despite the fact you cannot see it. (This is a technique I often find myself using on aircraft, if I am keen to work out the direction the aircraft is heading, but only have a perspective that does not include the sun).

There is one other aspect to this technique that makes it a favourite in winter. We get more unsettled weather in the winter months and the accompanying tall clouds. Bad weather is often preceded by towering cumuli and arrives with cumulonimbi, these giants can block out the sun, but they do occasionally hint at its whereabouts too.

The example above is obviously at the simplest end of the spectrum, sometimes it is much trickier – and can be more fun, if the pieces of the jigsaw fit! Which reminds me, it is nearly time for me click into Christmas mode.

I shall doubtless shortly be encouraged to help with some ludicrous jigsaw puzzle of the cardboard variety. But I shall seek my revenge by dragging everyone’s turkey-swollen bodies outside to do a cloud and sun jigsaw puzzle afterwards.

Happy Puzzling Times!

We only went for a short walk, it was more of an indoor interview than a walking one, but we were outdoors just long enough to appreciate the difference a couple of hundred feet of altitude can make. In the valleys it was far from balmy, but it was a pleasant temperature that did not draw attention to itself. On the tops of the South Downs, there was grimacing aplenty and the sandwiches we had planned to eat en route stayed in the rucksacks to be taken back down to the village of Houghton Bridge, whence they had come. The interview will appear in an issue of the Rambler’s ‘Walk’ magazine in spring 2012.

In other news… Well, if not news exactly, at least some prattling on about what I’ve been up to…

Over the past week I have bounced between London, courses in Sussex, nearly getting burned alive and getting very wet.

I spent Wednesday morning in the studios of ON FM. Joasia Tapson is a friend who hosts the wonderfully named, ‘Plasticine, Candles and Soup‘, slot on On Fm. Live local radio hosted by a friend is the perfect mix of a relaxing way to spend a morning… tinged with a vague awareness that it is still possible to say something really daft and impossible to retract.

Wednesday night was spent at Sceptre’s 25th Birthday bash at the Cavendish Club. There was a lot of book industry chat and networking going on, most of which was a foreign tongue to me. But there was also a touching moment when a magazine editor came up to me, introduced herself and said, ‘I bought your book for my Dad and he loved it!’ It really was a special moment, because I’d just spent an hour hearing grumbles about royalties from all sides and authors being referred to as ‘content-providers’ and similar. Still, mustn’t grumble myself, it was a great privilege to there. Happy Birthday, Sceptre, you’re the best!

Thursday could not have been much more different to the champagne flute surroundings of the Cavendish Club. A team from the MOD’s tri-service ‘The Defence Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Extraction (SERE) Training Organisation (DSTO)’ drove up from St Mawgan to spend a day on a course with me in West Sussex. It was a great privilege to run a course for a group that included military survival experts, military pilots and special forces soldiers.

On Friday I went for a cycle with a different type of elite unit, writers and photographers from Cycling Active magazine. It was fun, although it would be remiss of me not to point out, as I did to them several times on the day, that I am a **** awful cyclist.

On the weekend my wife and I kept to our tradition of celebrating our wedding anniversary by going for a sail. We headed over to Cowes on the Isle of Wight on Saturday afternoon. As the temperature on the boat headed confidently down towards zero degrees, the original plan of fine cuisine in Cowes was replaced by nipping into the local tandoori for something bigger and hotter, in both senses, to fuel us through a cold night on the boat.

We were moored against a wall and the swell from passing boats met swell reflecting from the wall, throwing the boat around like a toy at times. (It was of little consolation to my wife that this interference between incoming and reflected swell is the same as that used by Pacific Island navigators to detect the proximity of an island downwind!).

We did have a small heater on the boat, but one particularly vicious wave threw the heater across the saloon. The clatter of it landing was followed by my wife shouting, ‘Fire! Fire!’. The impact had detached some plastic inside the heater, which had come to rest on the hot element inside. Foul-smelling smoke began to fill the cabin, but there were no flames fortunately. I spent the following hour dismantling the heater and repairing it. It was a race to get it fixed before the frost began to form around us.

The drama of the heater was exceeded by the elements the following morning. The wind began at a Force 3, then grew to Force 4, then 5, before skipping Force 6 and going up to a Force 7 and staying there. The wind was not a problem, it was the sea conditions to the east of the Isle of Wight that were the challenge and I would not have wanted us to be in any other boat than my tried and tested Contessa 32, Golden Eye. Sophie’s face was quite a picture. It was that classic skipper’s challenge of remaining cool and calm as the workload steadily mounts. Remaining cool was made easier as I took a chilling wave down the back of the neck as I crawled to the mast to put another reef in the mainsail.

I know what you’re thinking… Not much chance of my marriage lasting to another wedding anniversary!

—————

Anyone who finds their mid-twenties easy is open to accusations of being a dullard. I wanted to be many things when I was twenty-five, but a dullard was not one of them. Fortunately, it proved to be a most irksome age.

Almost every molecule in my twenty-five year old body was urging me to become a writer. But, deciding to become a writer requires courage and I was lacking in it. The urging molecules and absent courage battled with each other and led to a nauseating, fizzing sensation. Sensible decisions, I now know, are not made in the midst of fizzing sensations.

Sitting on a bench in Paddington train station, I punished myself for a lack of courage by deciding to attempt to fly solo and then sail singlehanded across the Atlantic.

It took the view down into the blue from a single-engine aircraft, followed by the view up a series of monstrous white waves to convince me that it was time to write.

The blank page remains more fearsome and exciting than the Pond.

————-

Happy Birthday Sceptre!

Have an explore and get as lost in the website as you like!

There is more information about my book on natural navigation here.

If you did not arrive from the Today show, but would like to see the piece with Michelle Kosinski, then here it is.

Whilst it’s fun and helpful to be able to do the odd high profile thing, like TV or radio, what is more exciting for the long term is the way the grass-roots network is building around this unusual subject.

There is little that I love more than being made aware of one of the many natural navigation clues that have so far escaped my notice. I like to say towards the end of all my talks or courses, ‘You have unwittingly signed up to be part of my extended research team.’ I mean it half-jokingly and half-seriously, as I’m very aware that I can never see as much of the world as those who I meet can as a group.

Every time someone brings a new observation, technique or anecdote to my attention I note it down and make sure I keep a record of the source, the name of the person who was kind enough to send it my way. This body of knowledge is building all the time and before too long I plan to get a bit more serious about this side of things. In the meantime, here is a flavour of the wonderful diversity of knowledge and experience that I am being treated to.

On Monday, Dr. Lameen Souag wrote to me with links to some academic articles by Edmond Bernus and others about Tuareg navigation, orientation and star-lore. They’re in French, which has had me straining a little at times, but it really is great stuff. Thank you Lameen!

The day before, Leon Winnert, sent me the following email:

Hi Tristan,

I recently visited Israel doing the Holy Land tour. Basically visiting lots of churches built on sites reputed to be where significant events in JC’s life took place. I don’t dispute he was born in Bethlehem. It’s just that the Church of the Nativity, like the rest of the original churches, were built some 300 years after the event by Emperor Constantine’s wife. On sites she determined as being the spot. Anyway before I digress too far with my theories of historical inaccuracies based on hearsay and myth I will move on to the point of this message.

Now in the UK all churches face east; 090 degress give or take a couple of degrees. So I said to myself in which direction do the churches in Israel point? Do they point east, or to Bethlehem or to Jerusalem or what? With trusty compass in hand I set out to answer the question. Without exception 080 deg magnetic is the answer. Irrespective of whether the Church was very old, old or new.

By this I mean very old would be Churches based on those built by the Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries, in turn on the foundations of the original 4th century Byzantium buildings of the Constantine era. Old are churches associated with JC’s life events or otherwise, built say up to a couple of hundred years ago. And new are items built in the last few decades. Some replacing much older structures.

Essentially there is a considerable accord in the direction the churches face. And that is right across geographical location, the historical record and irrespective of which denomination owns them. Magnetic declination for Israel is 4 deg east. Which makes the direction the churches face 084 true. So why do they point 084 true and not due east?

Regards

Leon

Thanks Leon, wonderfully thought-provoking question! I have blogged about the orientation of churches in the UK in the past and pointed to some interesting investigation there, but if anyone has any light to shine on Leon’s questions do let me know so that I can pass it on.