On a family visit to Longleat on Monday there was the perfect illustration of a frustrating problem that has confronted me for over a decade.
Sometimes knowing the direction you want to go is not nearly enough.
Direction is the cornerstone of all navigation, not least natural. Natural navigators are sometimes forced towards a principle of ‘if we head towards our destination we will get there, eventually’.The problem lies in that sometimes even if we know the way we want to head it is not possible to go that way and we are forced to make difficult choices and compromises.
The Longleat maze is an extreme analogy of the challenge. Standing on one of the wooden bridges that give a limited overview of the maze structure it was quite easy to see the direction of our goal. The wooden fort in the centre of the maze was southwest of us, but this knowledge is next to useless if you come across a junction that offers routes without any southwest in them, as we of course did repeatedly. At that point you have to resort to instinct / guesswork / sixth sense / reading the mind of the enemy! That is point and the fun in a maze, but…
…sometimes the real world is not much kinder. A pure natural navigation exercise across the rural English landscape to a point only five miles away ‘as the crow flies’ can take five hours or more, if trespass is avoided. It is rare that a path junction gives you an option in exactly the direction you want to go, and so often when it does it will mock you by deviating wildly a few minutes later. This is the main reason that wilderness, even light shades of it, are so valuable for such pure exercises. Dartmoor poses its own challenges with its low level vegetation and even lower visibility at times, but it is a real treat in allowing a walker to pursue a line of their choice – until they are sucked into a bog at least!
Reading the land can help at times, particularly in hilly or mountainous terrain. The classic example is that it is usually better to follow a six mile curvaceous detour around a horseshoe ridge than to charge down into the steep valley and up the other side for the three mile short cut.
At one level this time issue does not matter very much. If time is really the issue then don’t walk, or get out a brace of compasses and GPSs. The heart of the frustration for me is not the time it takes to make the journey, but the time it takes to teach the skill. The best method of teaching is often to say ‘off you go’, but sadly the pressures of modern life are such that there are few who can afford to take a whole day over a few miles. Sometimes it feels as though there is little room for a slow skill in an instant gratification society. Fortunately for me there are still enough who have not signed up to that philosophy yet, who have not yielded all to convenience and who choose to learn this rare art instead.
Tags: instant gratification society, longleat maze, reading the land, rural english landscape
