The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Welcome Radio 4 listeners! You have found your way to the home of natural navigation on the Internet. (A podcast of my walk with Evan Davies for the Today programme can be found here. The short article that I wrote to go with the interview and the video that accompanied the broadcast can be found here.)

The book reviews are starting to come in:

‘In a sat-nav dominated world, where GPS and a host of other acronyms designed to get us from A to B have overtaken paper maps, it is refreshing to meet someone who understands technology, but prefers to find his way by practising the rare and ancient art of using nature’s signposts, from puddle patterns to shadow lenghths… I’m hooked. Back at the beech, I make a mental note of emerging bluebell patches, forming an internal map that I’ll use to find my way around the wood.’ – Paul…

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This is not the glorious image of the winter solstice sunrise that I had been planning for you. Events conspired against that.

The original plan had been to drive up to a semi-secret location in the South Downs and take a picture of the sun rising in what were originally forecast to be clear cold skies.

Yesterday morning I was driving the four miles from home to the gym but all four wheels of the Land Rover Defender lost traction on black ice and I slid headfirst into a substantial tree at about 25 miles-per-hour. I walked away from the car-and-tree amalgamation and felt very lucky to be in much better shape than either. My next thought was that my wife and kids were due to set out on the same road an hour after I had. My mobile phone was on charge at home. I ended up having to run home,…

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I’m just back from giving a short talk at the Royal Institute of Navigation’s Land Conference at the National Physical Laboratory.

I learnt plenty from the other speakers and chats during the breaks. One little gem: the Apollo program nearly lost two astronauts, literally. They were roaming the lunar surface and became temporarily unaware where ‘home’ was. Without a map, compass, GPS or any other instrument there were some tense moments before they found their way back successfully. Definitely an opportunity for some natural navigation training in this niche market, as I was not too shy to point out to the assembled!

Something that makes a walk on the moon more challenging than on earth is that the moon has a much smaller radius and therefore has a more dramatically curved surface, the result being you cannot see nearly as far on the moon as you can on Earth. All other things…

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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.

While sorting my photos from our summer holiday I came across this one on the way to Les Ecrehous islands. It shows a critical moment in the use of a transit line to navigate the potentially hazardous approach. Transit navigation works by the very simple (and totally natural) principle that if you can see any two objects lined up then you must be somewhere on an extension of that line. The approach to Les Ecrehous, northeast of Jersey in the Channel Islands is so strewn with rocks that even GPS is of limited use, since by the time it tells you you’re off course you could well be breathing brine.

Instead of one pair of markers, this part of the approach requires the navigator to line up the Bigorne rock inbetween two other rocks. Bigorne can be seen jutting up in the middle of the picture. In this part of the…

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I took this photo in St Peter Port, Guernsey, about ten days ago. This big fat gin palace probably doesn’t get lost very often, all they need do is squint at the setting sun through their ice cold sundowners, think about the season and latitude, then wait for the blue to turn black and the stars to appear. Or they could just turn on one of the many lovely gizmos sprouting all over the top of the boat. GPS would do it, radar would too, or they could make a satellite call and ‘phone a friend’.

During a mild tidying effort this morning I came close to throwing out the Jan/Feb issue of Navigation News, but then spotted something that I had originally overlooked. A news item that hinted that the role of GPS in our lives may be waning:

‘Investment bank Goldman Sachs has voiced the concern that 2009 could usher in several years of decline in the portable navigation device market. It made the comment while moving stocks in Garmin, one of the leading satnav manufacturers, to its ‘conviction sell’ list.’

I was mistaken. Unfortunately the reason it gave was not that everyone was switching to ‘NatNav’, but that smartphones were increasingly being fitted with navigation functions. Perhaps as this trend kicks in we can look forward to the sight of fat lorries wedged in narrow country lanes and people wedged inbetween trees too!

The worlds of technology, navigation and nature convened in a mildly surreal way over the past month.

Satellite navigation development, like all things space-related, often appears to be governed more by national pride than calm pragmatism. Nobody has yet explained effectively to me the need for billions to be invested in Galileo, the European alternative to the American GPS system. The Russian version of GPS, GLONASS, has not been a story of relentless success or necessity either, but apparently the system has now been tested on Vladimir Putin’s dog.

‘Mr Ivanov said that the equipment goes on a standby mode when “the dog doesn’t move, if it, say, lies down in a puddle.”

Mr Putin interrupted him jokingly: “My dog isn’t a piglet, it doesn’t lie in puddles.’

Navigation may fill my working hours, but even I couldn’t pretend that it is a high profile topic. Last week however a story about cows pointing north and south started appearing everywhere, there is a good summary on the BBC website.
On Saturday the Times newspaper ran a main news story and editorial piece describing how GPS navigators are not getting the full experience and are being denied the benefit of the rich detail of traditional maps. They put it well, ‘Turn left on to the A303 for Andover, ignoring the ancient stones: those without a map may not know they are passing Stonehenge.’
Perhaps this mini-surge of interest is why they were kind enough to run a snippet about my courses too.

A blog is not a blog without an occasional rant, so…

It strikes me that the world of navigation training has strayed a little off course. If you type “navigation courses” into Google you get nearly five and a half million results. I’d be prepared to wager that more than five million of these are associated with ‘traditional’ training. To my mind the majority of these are falling between two stools. They focus on using tools but not the best ones. The two ends of the spectrum are electronics and nature. Nobody, myself included, argues that natural methods are more accurate than electronics when it is working. Equally, nobody in their right mind would want to challenge someone holding a working GPS to a position-fixing competition using compass back-bearings. Where am I going with this?

Well, why do we concentrate the vast majority of our training and learning in the area that…

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