The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I’m just back from some micronavigation in the Black Mountains in Wales.

I should get a chance to blog in more detail in time, but for now I just wanted to share a couple of nice clues I found in the light snow and ice I walked amongst.

The first photo shows the first snow I encountered on a climb out of the Vale of Ewyas. We are looking east in this picture, the only snow to have survived the thawing warmth of the day are the thin strips hiding in the shade on the south side of the path. This technique is analogous to the one using puddles on the south side of west-east tracks.

The sunlight can be seen lighting the hillside in the background and unsurprisingly there is little snow to be found there. It is only in the shadows that it survives on the lower…

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Last night I caught a few minutes of a programme on BBC4, called ‘Unnatural Histories.’

As so often seems to be the case, a short stroll from the mainstream channels uncovered rough diamonds.

In the programme, an aerial shot showed us clearly visible patterns in the earth, patterns that were partly concealed at ground level by dense undergrowth. The narrator explained that we were looking at ‘geoglyphs’ in the Amazon rainforest. Geoglyphs are shapes that have been deliberately formed in the land by the hand of man.

Like many pilots, I have come to love the way it is possible in the air to spot patterns in the earth that are hard to notice on the ground. Lines that are lost in their surroundings on terra firma, stand out luminously from 3000 feet. But my experience has been restricted to European Iron Age Hill Forts and the like. This was…

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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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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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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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I crept outside this morning, trying not to wake the kids, and treated my self to a pre-heliacal viewing of Saturn. He was happily nestled under the star Porrima, that is to say between Virgo’s armpit and her shoulder.

If you are awake shortly before sunrise over the next couple of weeks, look just south of east. If it is clear then you should see what appears to be white star on top of a yellow one, both of them sitting not far above the horizon. The higher of the two is Gamma Virginis, or Porrima, in the constellation, Virgo. Below that will be the orangey-yellow Saturn. Neither of them are especially bright and so they will not stand out with the confidence that Jupiter is doing at night at the moment, but they should still be easy to find until the first light of dawn swamps them.

NB. Try…

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I have just been watching a beautiful full moon rising above the trees in the east. It was shrouded in layers of cirrostratus for a few minutes, but then rose above them.

In winter full moons rise north of east, in summer they rise south of east. They rise further from east the nearer we get to the solstices. The full moon always behaves in the opposite way to the sun, in time and direction, as it is opposite the sun in its cycle.

We are bearing down on stargazing-season. It is getting dark early enough in the evenings, staying dark long enough in the mornings and doesn’t yet freeze you for the privilege.

This morning I enjoyed a view of Orion, Sirius, Leo, which has just marched ahead of the dawn sun now, and a few other players. I took this photo of Orion’s Sword hanging down to the left (eastern) side of a large beech tree and dangling down towards the south, as it does. The ‘smudge’ in the middle is the Great Nebula in Orion, also known less romantically as ‘M42′. It is a ‘stellar nursery’ where new stars are born. Would a more appropriate term not be a ‘stellar maternity ward’?

On a different subject, my best wishes and good luck to Kevin Shannon who is attempting a zero-emissions circumnavigation of the globe. He asked me for my thoughts,…

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I was at the Goodwood Vintage Festival last night. We saw Ronnie Wood and his band, The Faces, as well as The Wailers. When the moody clouds passed, I couldn’t help glancing up at the Plough, Arcturus, Cassiopeia, Perseus and Jupiter rising in the east. Even managed to catch a couple of great Perseid meteors, one of which burnt a smoky trail across the sky, visible above the bright lights of the Big Wheel. Vintage.

Sorry if you are trying to buy a copy of ‘The Natural Navigator’ – Amazon have sold out again!

After selling out, restocking and two reprints in the past three weeks, the book is now temporarily out of stock again on Amazon. Another massive thanks to everyone who has bought a copy so far.

You can still order it from Amazon. Or there are still quite a few bookshops that have a copy (worth phoning before), or online while stocks last at these places:

The Book Depository

Waterstones

Foyles

The photo above is of the hill to the east of my home, taken very early this morning. This is the first time this year that the morning light has appeared from the north of the hill. By June the sun will have moved all the way up to northeast.