The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Welcome to the Natural Navigator

For a short and strange time, the esoteric, romantic and mostly-undiscovered subject of natural navigation is about to shrug off its shyness and dive, screaming and giggling, into the mainstream.

On Wednesday 5th October at 8pm, All Roads Lead Home, will be on BBC2.

It is going to be a beautiful moment, except the bits I’m in, which will be a bit feral.

In the programme, Alison Steadman, Sue Perkins and Stephen Mangan learn the basics of natural navigation before being released into the wilds of Cornwall (Episode 1), Ireland and then Wales & Liverpool.

I will be posting more about the programme, including some info about the making of the series on this website over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the programme.

You’ll love the telly, it’s like the newfangled internet but with good-quality large pictures that move and excellent…

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A blog of two halves for you today.

Late September can bring some of the best early evening experiences for those who enjoy looking upwards.

Visibility is likely to fluctuate a bit, but it looks as though we may get some of the best stargazing weather of the year over the next few nights. It promises to be warm enough to enjoy long spells outside, but without the crazily late sunsets of midsummer.

I’ll point out a few of the things worth looking for in a minute, but first just a few words about this weather.

On my courses I encourage people to take note of shifts in wind direction and how this relates to changes in weather patterns. If the weather is unseasonably warm or cold, we should expect some deviation from the prevailing wind direction, southwest.

The image above shows the UK (at lunchtime tomorrow) sandwiched neatly between…

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We may never know the exact method that the earliest explorers used to find their way, but there is a friendly finger of suspicion that gets pointed regularly at the birds.

Some of the routes used by the pioneers of the Pacific match the migratory routes of the birds exactly.

The route used by the Maori fleet that sailed from Tahiti to New Zealand sometime in the fourteenth century and settled there is the same as that taken by the Long-tailed Cuckoo each September.

I like to think of these earliest navigators. I imagine them gazing up as flocks of birds head uniformly over the horizon in one direction only to repeat the exercised in the opposite direction half a year later. It does not take great leaps of the imagination to deduce that the birds are not doing this great exercise for fun, QED, there must be something in…

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OK, it’s confession time. Again.

I’m just back from a week’s holiday with my wife on the Greek island of Kefalonia. It was our first holiday without the kids for about seven years, which felt bizarre from start to finish. This is the only, admittedly weak, excuse for the navigational lapse that ensued.

In Fiskardo, at the northern end of Kefalonia, we hired a small day-boat and spent many mornings motoring up and down the east coast of Kefalonia. We pursued the not very stressful business of hunting quiet bays and seeking secluded beaches for a swim.

On the fifth morning we putt-putted all the way round the northern Kefalonian coast to a beach at the northern tip of the island called, Dafnoudi beach.

We had spent almost all of the week on the east coast of the Kefalonia looking across the water, to the east, and seeing the beautiful…

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Welcome to those of you who have found your way here, on the trail from BBC1′s Country Tracks. (For those of you who haven’t, a programme has just gone out on BBC1 in which I gave the presenter Miriam Cooke some natural navigation tips in a forest by the Arch, near Devil’s Bridge, in Ceredigion, Wales. There’s a short clip here.)

However you found your way, now that you are here have a bit of an explore and get as lost in this website as you like.

If you’ve enjoyed watching some natural navigation on TV, then make sure you tune to the series, All Roads Lead Home, which will go out on BBC2 in October.

If you’d like to learn more about natural navigation in the meantime, then have a browse of the website or my book on the subject.

Thank you to Andrew Boe, who has dropped me line explaining something that I have not noticed before:

“Leaves at the bottom of a tree are often larger on the shadier North side to make the most of available light. This is often the case in Sycamore. They will also be darker due to the high concentrations of chlorophyll.”

From now on, I’ll be on the lookout for these shady characters. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Andrew has a bushcraft blog which is well worth checking out here.

My thanks to Richard Webber for sending in this photo. The telegraph poles in this picture are leaning from the southwest to the northeast. This is in line with the prevailing wind, which is easy to tell in the photo if you look at the straggly bits that have been combed over at the top of the hedge.

The question is, is this a coincidence or the cause?

Please could anyone pass on any observations they have of leaning telegraph poles and together we may be able to forge a new technique.

The news that rebel forces are pushing south in Libya, has taken me back to the short time I spent in Sebha in February and March 2009.

Sebha has a domestic airport and I was using it as my  gateway; it allowed me to jump from the coastal capital of Tripoli into deeper, Saharan Libya. The foreign correspondents are now feeding back items about the importance of the tribes in the area. This is something that resonates for me, because although I only had the opportunity for a few hours in the area before heading away from the town and into the desert itself, the impression it left me with was strong and one I can only describe as ‘indigenous intimacy’.

The airport itself is tiny, but was full of almost exclusively men, all in traditional dress, who appeared to be kissing one another incessantly. There was not one hint…

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The research that I have been doing for the book I am currently writing led me to an interesting study. Academics have found that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and awareness of nature. This trend appears to be true in places as different as Indonesia and the UK.

The number of local plant species that people can identify tends to be inversely proportional to their income. The study did not reveal whether this was a cultural phenomenon or purely economic one, ie. do people know solely because they need to or also because they want to?

I was reminded of this study yesterday evening as I re-read an old favourite of mine, George Orwell’s ‘Down and Out in Paris and London‘. One of my favourite passages about the stars can be found in this book. Orwell is spending time with a ‘screever’, a pavement artist, and finds this…

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Natural navigation is at its most fun when it is a puzzle and a test of our senses. Have a look at this photo and get ready to test your powers of observation.

This is a photo of a monkey puzzle tree that I have been growing in our greenhouse since early this year. I have taken it out of the greenhouse for better light for this photo. Greenhouses are great places to study the effect of sunlight on plant growth because all the wind effects are cancelled.

Now see if you can tell in which direction this photo was taken. Are we looking north, south, east or west?

Answer time…

In this photo we are looking west. The monkey puzzle tree has grown towards the southern light to the left, an effect known as ‘phototropism’.

‘That’s easy!’ I hear some of you cry, but I did warn you that…

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