The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Welcome to the Natural Navigator

I was going to wait until next year before getting the word out about this event, but… The Sunday Times have just very kindly spilled the beans by suggesting it as a Christmas gift.

On March 15th at The School of Life, I am going to begin the challenging business of changing the way we think about exploration.

I will be attempting, against the odds, to wrest exploration back from those who think it is all about racing to summits or unhealthily-long relationships with camels.

By looking at the experiences of some of the most insightful travellers of the past 2000 years, I will be showing how it is possible to raise our levels of awareness to new heights and make discoveries in the most unlikely places.

All being well, exploration will return to its roots and become, once more, about a sense of discovery on our journeys, large…

Read More...

My thanks to Tim and Laura Moss, who braved the elements on Bignor Hill yesterday afternoon. They found themselves wrapping up warm and staring into the November wind thanks to a wedding present of a natural navigation course. (I didn’t get to read the card, but maybe it said something along the lines of ‘If you can smile through this, you’ll be very happy!’).

It was a fun afternoon, especially as I got to watch Tim and Laura’s face expressions as they grappled with such fun concepts as ‘How to find the south celestial pole from a field in West Sussex.’ Well, they did ask!

My main reason for posting is to let you know about Tim’s work. He runs ‘The Next Challenge‘, which offers advice, research and logistical support for those who are planning their own expeditions. He’s currently helping Sarah Outen in this capacity, as she…

Read More...

Here’s a sneak preview of the cover to my new book, The Natural Explorer. It is being published in March by Sceptre.

What do you reckon? Let me know on Twitter (@naturalnav) or by email.

In this photo, one of the Outward Bound Oman instructors, who I visited recently, is being taught how to use a traditional and beautifully simple navigational instrument called a ‘kamal’.

This instrument is as simple as they get: it works by forming a triangle. If you know the base of a triangle (the fixed length of twine from eye to instrument) and you know the height of the triangle (the number of fingers counted up from the horizon), then you have a fixed angle to the horizon. This is the ancestor of nearly all navigational instruments prior to electronics. (In fact the triangulation used has a lot in common with the way GPS works, but that is another story.)

How does it work in practice?

Here’s the simplest example: the Pole Star (Polaris, North Star) will be the same angle above your horizon as your latitude. At the North Pole…

Read More...

As promised, here is a more detailed update on my short time in Oman last week. My main reason for being there was to train the Omani Outward Bound instructors. In the short time available I wanted to give them a decent understanding of how to use nature’s clues to find their way in the desert. Just as importantly, I needed to give them the techniques and knowledge they could pass onto their future students.

We started with theory indoors at the offices of Outward Bound Oman, with the help of planetarium software and makeshift whiteboards (paper Sellotaped to a cupboard). After three hours of theory, it was time to head out in 4x4s for a 3 hour drive into the desert, for some more practical training.

We tracked the sun down to the horizon and confirmed that it had indeed set a good 15 degrees south of west.…

Read More...

Thank you to everyone who came to the course at the Royal Geographical Society on Friday. Also to those who came to the talk and walk on Saturday and to Rohan for organising and sponsoring the event.

I have just returned from a wonderful two days in the desert in Oman, where I have been teaching a group of Outward Bound Oman instructors some techniques for them to pass on to their students. In the picture above we are marking out the shadows from a stick in the sand.

We also looked at the clues in the dunes, the trees and smaller plants, the weather, the stars, moon and planets and many other things which I will be revisiting here on the blog when the desert dust falls off my rucksack and settles a bit.

One of the many highlights of the short trip was a chance…

Read More...

Have you had that feeling recently that the season has not so much shifted to autumn, as snapped?

There is a time each year when we get this feeling and its suddenness not purely psychological, it is because we witness the most dramatic changes in the Earth-Sun relationship at two times in the year: spring and autumn.

Some of the things that we tend to assume change gradually, actually don’t at all. On this blog I have mentioned that the bearing of sunrise and sunset change most dramatically at the equinoxes, in March and September, and briefly stand still at the solstices.

There are other things that change with varying speed over the course of the year and they follow a similar pattern. The length of day hovers at the same length at each solstice, but changes rapidly in spring and autumn. For example, in London (latitude is important),…

Read More...

It has been quite a restless few days.

Last Saturday I spent the morning in London as a guest on BBC Radio 4′s Excess Baggage. In the evening  I led a group on a night walk. The conditions were perfect. We watched as blue turned to orange. Then as the orange faded to dark blue and black we were treated as Arcturus, Deneb, Altair, Vega, Capella and others began to appear. Lurking luminously between the silhouetted branches of a two hawthorns there was a bright white light in the east. It refused to move or twinkle. It wasn’t an aircraft or a star, it was Jupiter rising to rule the sky. We looked at five different methods for finding the North Star.

Thank you to all 400 who came to a Night of Adventure in Bristol on Monday. Great cause, great audience, fun night. If this night comes to…

Read More...

It would be true to say that I would not be writing this blog if the sun rose in the same place each day. I don’t mean that in a very general sense, it’s not because the whole world would be very different and maybe the dinosaurs would have survived and humans would never have evolved, blah, blah…

No, it is because in the spring of 2008 I was busy trying to work out whether there was any point in trying to make a living by teaching natural navigation, or not. Whether, perhaps, that was the stupidest idea I had ever had, a competition with some depth in the field. The problem was that there was no ‘sensible’ way of deciding whether to go ahead with it or not. There was no point bouncing the idea off family, bank managers, priests or ouija boards. The answers that would come back…

Read More...

A huge thank you to everyone for all the messages that have been coming in about All Roads Lead Home. I thought it was time that I added a bit more information about the series.

Below is a blog I wrote for the BBC website, which went out just before the programme on Wednesday.

I also wrote a piece for the BBC News Online Magazine, about 6 unusual methods for keeping your bearings whilst in a town. As soon as it went out, it went nuts. More than 300 people left comments before comments were switched off. Here is a feedback email from the BBC:

…

Read More...