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 Evans, BBC Wildlife Magazine.

‘The perfect book for getting you started on your own adventure.’ - Ranulph Fiennes

‘Even if most of us are unlikely to have to navigate a wilderness, learning to read nature can enhance a walk in a city park or a stroll along the beachfront. Read this and you will never look at the sky or a tree the same way again.’ Clint Witchalls, New Scientist. You can read the full review here.

‘Gooley’s calm, contemplative authority on matters solar, lunar and celestial establishes his guru credentials – but it’s his revelations about the clues that lie scattered about the natural environment that really entrance: how puddles drying on paths, the shapes of sand dunes, the graininess of scree on the lee of a slope can all be enlisted to summon compass points to your horizon.’ Chris Bourn, Time Out. You can read the full review here.

There are also some reviews on Amazon.co.uk.

If you’re wondering what the picture above has to do with anything…

I gave a talk at the Goodwood Estate last night. It took place in a function room in the Goodwood Hotel, but the details were only finalised at the last minute and we were only able to give vague instructions and directions.

Fortunately, lots of people did make it. I confess to having had visions of people staggering around in the cold fog, accosting passers-by and wailing about a strange natural navigation event. The talk began by my declaring that those who had managed to find the the room, tucked away at the end of many sinuous corridors, must represent the cream of the navigational crop of West Sussex.

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, cross-country in snow and as fast as I could, in order to get to them before they set off in a car that would have found the conditions even more lethal. I know the local country quite well, but had to take the most direct route home, something that I had not had to do from that area before. The sun was up and I made my way through woods and fields and over fences in a straight line home, obviously no map, compass or GPS involved. I got back just in time. The car was picked up later by a recovery garage, I have yet to hear whether it will drive again.

I was still keen to get a shot of the winter solstice sunrise, but without a car made a plan and laid out my clothes and boots last night. When I got up at 6am, the weather had deteriorated and cloud dominated. Still, it’s good to be alive at this moment that has been celebrated since prehistoric times!

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 being equal your horizon is much closer on the moon and things will drop out of sight far more quickly. Please keep this in mind for your next lunar ramble.

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.

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 world, the task is not made any easier by the fact that the tidal range is so great that the landscape changes dramatically every six hours. Visibility can reduce rapidly too, as it was when I took this photo.

PS. I was going to title this post, ‘Transit Rocks’, but decided on this, the air-guitar version.

‘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!

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.’

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 is now neither the most accurate nor the most resilient? Electronic navigation is the most accurate when it works and natural navigation cannot break. I am not suggesting that we don’t continue to learn how to use compasses and other tools that are less accurate and not immune to failure, I am just questioning whether we should have so many eggs in those baskets at the expense of natural awareness. Would we not be better off spending a small fraction of that time studying the world around us without any tools at all?