The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Happy New Year!

I do not share everything in this blog, you will be pleased to know. Most matters familial and ablutionary are kept from these pages.

So too are exact locations from time to time. It is not usually necessary to pinpoint the precise spot where a natural navigation technique revealed itself, or to give a 16 figure grid reference of the perch from which a photograph was taken.

Sometimes, I must confess that I deliberately fail, as unostentatiously as possible, to reveal even a general location if I am keen not to encourage visitors for any reason. This is rare, but it does happen. I have walked on certain routes in the Lake District and felt guilty for having let my boots join the millions of others that etch too deeply into these rocks at times. The guilt would worsen if I then added in any way to…

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Sceptre, the publisher of my upcoming book, is celebrating its 25th birthday this year. To mark the occasion, Sceptre invited their writers to pen something on the theme of 25. The following formed my birthday offering.

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Anyone who finds their mid-twenties easy is open to accusations of being a dullard. I wanted to be many things when I was twenty-five, but a dullard was not one of them. Fortunately, it proved to be a most irksome age.

Almost every molecule in my twenty-five year old body was urging me to become a writer. But, deciding to become a writer requires courage and I was lacking in it. The urging molecules and absent courage battled with each other and led to a nauseating, fizzing sensation. Sensible decisions, I now know, are not made in the midst of fizzing sensations.

Sitting on a bench in Paddington train station,…

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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.

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…

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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.

The Natural Navigator Pocket Guide is out now!

Who is this book for? How does it differ from the original book? How big is it? So many questions!

First the jacket blurb, then my take on the book:

‘Starting with a simple question – ‘Which way am I looking?’ – Tristan Gooley blends natural science, myth, folklore and the history of travel to introduce you to the rare and ancient art of finding your way using nature’s own sign-posts, from the feel of a rock to the look of the moon.

With Tristan’s help, you’ll learn why some trees grow the way they do and how they can help you find your way in the countryside. You’ll discover how it’s possible to find North simply by looking at a puddle and how natural signs can be used to navigate on the open ocean and in the heart of…

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The National Trust is asking people to vote for their favourite outdoors book, published in hardback or paperback in the UK, since January 2010.

It only takes 5 seconds to vote:

This could be lichened to an X-Factor for outdoors books and I thought it would be nice to sea if I could get the word out there. Of course it would be tree-mendous and I’d be over the moon, it really would be a very sunny day to see The Natural Navigator star in such a way, but I must be on another planet to think that it stands a chance.The question is not weather it should win, but whether anything can beat the old birds. There are one or two books that appear to be plants, that will probably win regardless of the voting and that would cast a terrible shadow on this whole thing. If you feel…

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Full marks to Radio 4′s Today programme for allowing even a few minutes’ discussion of the role of technology in our appreciation and understanding of nature.

Mike Saunders, Kew Garden’s Digital head, and I exchanged ideas and perspectives yesterday in a glancing and enjoyable way.  ‘Today’ is prime radio real estate and they could not have been expected to indulge us for much longer.

Of course there were many points that I would have like to have made, but could not, the effect being a rather truncated view, which appears to many to be fairly blunt. No wonder I was accused by a few of being a Luddite! My fascination and interest in technology might surprise them, but that’s not important.

If I’d had the opportunity, the point I would have loved to have shoe-horned into yesterday’s discussion was that I believe the best of both worlds is achieved…

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“This in-depth book gives us the tools to re-engage with our natural world in a clear and understandable way. I love it!”

Bear Grylls

Massive thanks Bear!

My thanks to all the GQ readers who came to my natural navigation talk at Molton House in the West End last night. Thanks also to Monkey Shoulder whisky for hosting the night.

I am fortunate, my work takes me to all sorts of places: deserts, mountains, universities, bookshops, islands, offices, clubs, societies… but never before had I been invited to a venue that describes itself as, ‘a sybaritic haven’.

If talking about the natural world in such a quintessentially urban venue was to some extent a clash of cultures, then it did not seem to phase readers of GQ, who beat the tube strike to pack the place out. There were lots of good questions at the end of the talk. Notably a series of ones enquiring about the difference in abilities between men and women. It wasn’t an all-male audience by a long way and,…

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