The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

A walk along the edge of Nutbourne marshes on the weekend was an early taste of real summer. A sunny May day often feels hotter than a midsummer one to me, perhaps because I have not yet acclimatised. There were thousands of midges and flies, swirling up from the drying seaweed to complete the sensation.

These two pictures show the same field and only two minutes of walking passed between each shot. It is late afternoon and one of these is taken looking north, the shadows falling to the east and right of each furrow ridge.

I opened some very usual letters this morning and then one very unusual and nice one telling me that I have been elected to Fellowship of the Royal Institute of Navigation, “In recognition of his demonstration and promotion of natural navigation techniques and his personal achievements.”

As starts to the week go, that’s right up there.

When taking this picture of the moon last night the shutter speed was much slower than I had planned. The resulting photograph struck me as a reminder that it is the sun’s light that we see when looking at the moon.

This just in…

Tristan

Many thanks for a fantastic day yesterday.

I learnt so much and was stimulated also by the opportunity to apply what I did know to a new “problem solving” challenge! I checked out the moon last night and located Polaris and was quite comfortable that it was NOT directly above my head as I always imagined it might be! (I do need to re-set the weathervane and I think I’ll use Polaris to do this!)

The principles you taught will add another layer to my enjoyment and connection with the great outdoors. So rather than just walking through it and looking at the views I’ll be able to read more off it. Natural Navigation is a key to unlocking a fascinating text in the Earth’s rich library.

Thanks again for a very inspiring day – just off to check the lichen and moss on the trees in the garden!

Richard W (Cambridge)

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During a private course yesterday we spent some time looking at the effect of the wind on trees and grass. We also looked at the lee effect, when leaves and other natural drifting materials accumulate on the lee side of obstacles.

This is something that I am both more sensitive to and wary of since my trip to the Sahara in March. The lee effect there puzzled me for several days until a sandstorm blew in and blotted out the sky. Ironically it clarified things mentally. There is a difference between a prevailing wind and wind that has a huge short-term impact. The sand that was deposited in some areas that I crossed in Libya indicated a wind direction that clashed with the direction that both the trees and the dunes were suggesting. It became clear that this was caused by a sandstorm blowing in from a different direction to the…

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This morning was filled with a breezy walk up to Halnaker Windmill. The sun was out for most of the way up the hill, but the sky also had a generous share of cumulus clouds.

Natural navigation is a mixture of art and science and this can be felt very strongly when the sun disappears behind the clouds. Science allows us to understand the direction that the sun will be and there is an art to reading the cloud edges to reveal the direction of the sun, even when we cannot see it.

The low trees on the exposed hilltop had been groomed by the prevailing southwesterly winds. There were green, grey and gold lichens layering the various sides of the brick.

During the Beginner’s Guide course at West Dean College today we watched a few minutes from the unique film, ‘The Navigators’.

The film is about Mau Pialug, one of a very small number of Pacific Islanders still skilled in using traditional Pacific navigation methods. He explains his use of the stars and swell and demonstrates the methods using rocks on the beach, before embarking on an epic voyage without using instruments.

Mau Pialug went on to play an important role in the founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving the traditional navigation methods.

I try not to let politics enter my mind too much when out walking, but sometimes it helps to be aware of some of the tinkering that the political animals are up to. In the interests of the environment farmers are discouraged from working the land right up to the edge of woodland. They can set some of this land aside, typically a strip up to 8m, and be compensated for it through the government’s Entry Level Stewardship scheme.

The farmers are finely tuned into what is and is not productive land, they know from experience the parts of their fields that are not high-yielding. This will very often coincide with the areas that the sun does not reach fully, the shadows on the north side of tall trees for example. There is a bias towards finding these ‘buffer strips’ on the northern side of woodland, at the southern edge…

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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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