The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

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…

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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.

Thomas Manning (1772-1840) was an eccentric academic and the first British traveller to reach Tibet. After donning a heavy disguise and much perseverance and patience he finally met the Dalai Lama, who was only seven years old at the time.

An excerpt from his account of his travels is a good reminder of how much better connected the travellers of old were to the incestuous relationship between the sun, time and direction.

We hurried into the town where we were to change
horses, but our haste was fruitless. There we were obliged to wait
until our baggage came up long, long after us, and until it was
adjusted upon fresh cattle. If we now had galloped all the way to
Lhasa the sun would have been in the south before we could have
been in the august presence of the Tagin. This was exceeding
discomfort to my Munshi, but great

…

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I recently came across this short video by Michael Barton. It contains a neat natural navigation tip and bushcraft at its most fun. Click on the image below to watch the video.

The heat seems to have abated a little, but the sun has left its great big footprints all over the countryside. The baked earth is cracked and fissures run along paths and the edges of the fields, more on the northern side than the southern.

The grass of our garden lawn is doing its best to betray both the sun’s arc and the motion of the trees’ shadows during the course of the day. The lawn is a patchwork of varying shades of green and brown, but it is not random and tells a story of heat and shade that is rooted in the direction of the sun.

I came across this fantastic map showing the direction of Mecca, known as ‘al Qiblah’, from different parts of the world.

It shows quite beautifully how counterintuitive it can be over the surface of a sphere. Who would have thought that the direction of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, from New York is northeast? This is due to the fact that the direction is calculated using the shortest route and this is what is known as a great circle route. If you want to get from A to B across the surface of a sphere then the most direct route will always be a part of a circle which if continued would wrap itself all the way round the Earth, in a full circuference of the planet, and return to exactly the same point as you started at – a great circle. (This is the reason that airline route maps…

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‘Courting bustards’ is not an excellent new profanity, something that would sound good with rasping voice and sent in the general direction of a parking warden putting a ticket on your car, it is actually a reference to the romantic habits of the male great bustard bird.

Researchers from the IE University School of Biology in Santa Cruz, Spain, have found that the male bustards align themselves with the sun when trying to attract a female. Their white feathers, the bustard’s equivalent of an Armani suit/Ferrari/pair of Reeboks – delete as applicable, show up better when aligned to catch the sun’s rays. Dr Tommaso Pizzari, an ornithologist from Oxford University, observed that although it made the birds more vulnerable to predators, it certainly made them more visible to females. ‘That’s why we think these puzzling traits evolved and are specific to males.’

Although the bustards have been found to do…

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There is a good photo of the Great Lettuce, Lactuca Virosa, with its leaves aligned north-south on the Adur Wild Flower website. If you do use this to find your way then make sure you don’t eat too much of it as it is reputed to have psychotropic qualities. You are likely to head off in the right direction, walk in a circle and then find yourself back in the same spot, shouting something like, ‘Great Lettuce, Batman!’ I digress.

Apologies all blog readers. Firstly the last post wasn’t really fair. The picture quality isn’t good enough to be able to tell that the grasses have been blown in the direction that the picture is being taken or that the distant horizon is bright. The photo was taken a few weeks ago in Wensleydale looking ENE towards the dawn light.

Secondly, I’ve been out of touch longer than hoped for as I’ve been travelling in some nearby, but strangely wild places recently with limited options for internet access, including deepest darkest Brittany and a hut on some rocks in the Channel Islands called Les Ecrehou . Back soon and normal service will resume hopefully!

I took this picture a week ago. It shows the lower fair-weather cumulus clouds against the upper cirrus clouds. It is not at all unusual to watch the lower clouds and upper clouds move in different directions and to feel a third wind direction on your face at the same time.