The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

It has been an interesting few days. I spent yesterday in the South Downs with Michelle Kosinski and the crew from America’s NBC network.

Whilst it’s fun and helpful to be able to do the odd high profile thing, like TV or radio, what is more exciting for the long term is the way the grass-roots network is building around this unusual subject.

There is little that I love more than being made aware of one of the many natural navigation clues that have so far escaped my notice. I like to say towards the end of all my talks or courses, ‘You have unwittingly signed up to be part of my extended research team.’ I mean it half-jokingly and half-seriously, as I’m very aware that I can never see as much of the world as those who I meet can as a group.

Every time someone brings a…

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There is a wonderful article on the orientation of churches here, from a 2007 issue of Archaeology magazine. My thanks to Doug for making me aware of it.

“Armed with a Silva compass fixed to a piece of wood with brass screws, over 10 years Ian Hinton surveyed almost 1,750 churches in England and Wales. He resolved an old belief – but uncovered a new mystery.”

For those who do not have the time to immerse themselves… the answer is yes, churches do face east , but not perfectly and the discrepancy varies with location. The average ‘error’ is only 4 degrees, which is pretty good.

There are some tendencies that are very interesting: mainly that a church is more likely to be aligned north of east if the church itself is situated in the west of the country. This is a trend that the author, Ian Hinton, says…

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The past few days have seen me bouncing between meetings in London – pinging between Kensington, White City and Theatreland. Throw in a Tube strike on the Tuesday and the stage was set for some urban natural navigation.

The sun, trees, churches, clouds and satellite dishes all played their parts, but there are so many lesser known roles in the epic production that is ‘City Navigating’.

As if to prove this I received a message a couple of days ago from someone who had read the book and got in touch with some intriguing urban ideas. Clem McEwen drew my attention to two methods which sounded familiar, but which are certainly not well known to me, or used by me… yet!

1) Street numbering. Streets are normally numbered in ascending order away from the centre of a town, with the numbers 1 and 2 being closest to the centre, normally…

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Churches are well worth a minute of navigational inquiry. The church itself is likely to show a preference for an east-west alignment, with the altar at the eastern end. But the fact that they are often old buildings that have been left exposed to the elements for long periods, without incessant redecorating or even cleaning, yields other interesting clues in the form of lichens, algae and mosses.

Gravestones tend also to be aligned east-west also, so that the dead are ready when ‘the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised’. Any exposed stone that faces east or west will receive a mixture of sunlight and shade. Consequently they typically display a mixture of lichen types, as in the gravestone in this photo, in the graveyard of St Giles church in the quiet West Sussex village of Graffham.

On this gravestone there are a preponderance of gold and…

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I have found myself at airports a lot recently and it occurred to me that there is not very much to inspire those interested in nature about them in general. It does sometimes take a bit of lateral thinking to spot the clues in places like that.

Some man-made structures can give us a clue to help us on our way until nature comes to our aid again. Churches are a good example. A lot of churches are aligned East-West and this can offer a short term hand if all else is proving confusing, not unusual in a built-up area. The problem with a lot of artificial clues like this though is that they are very short-lived, they offer a clue for a few seconds or minutes at best, but then disappear out of sight and leave the navigator on their own again. Airports, with a little lateral and…

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