The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Over the weekend I was camping in the Cotswolds with a couple of old friends. Those who follow the blog closely may have spotted that makes three back-to-back camping trips over half-term. Nine nights under canvas in the British countryside and already being indoors has started to feel quite strange.

We walked fifteen miles on the Saturday and it was a joy to let the others take control of the navigation. I couldn’t resist the odd peek at the OS map out of curiosity, but generally tried to just go where I was told.

We nearly stepped on a grass snake at one point, but we persevered and the day finished in the extremely attractive and gloriously Cotswoldian village of Combe, where they were holding a fundraising cream tea for their village hall. The sound of the cricket match wafted over from the green as we did our bit for…

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If you are feeling peculiar then it is probably best not to venture outside tonight. The gravitational pull of the full moon’s alignment with the sun might have strange effects as it pulls on the water in your brain. Or so the ancients believed.

Alternately, you might want to do something that GPS users would see as a symptom of madness and use it to find east in the early evening, south at midnight and west before dawn.

I took this photo about ten minutes ago (18.23 GMT), looking east.

Many thanks to Tessa for this email. Uplifting story and so much more real than some of the dusty books about ancient astronomy that I have been reading recently…

Hi Tristan,

I very much enjoyed the Natural Navigation course last week and am certainly much more aware of the position of the sun every day than I was before.

As I was walking the dog this morning  it came to mind that but for an awareness of natural navigation by my father I might not be here!  My father was in POW camp in Italy during the war and was being moved by train into Germany towards the end of the war. The prisoners were transferred from one train to another and my father and two others managed to hide under the train where they stayed until it was dark.  They then walked back to England finding their way back by using the stars as…

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