The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

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 watched the History Channel’s ‘Expedition: Africa’ last night, a retake on Stanley’s expedition to find Livingstone. It is quite enjoyable if a bit ‘light’, the interest certainly coming from the internal politics of the expedition team rather than the nature of the journey itself. One thing did strike me, one of their challenges is billed as ‘using only compasses and basic maps’, which could only be billed as a challenge in the age of satellite navigation. Even this seemed to rob the team of some of their awareness of their surroundings. Pasquale Scaturro, the navigator, takes a compass bearing and then navigates from ‘tree to tree’ despite numerous clues in the sky and ground to help him hold a course. To be fair Benedict Allen does point out that the river would give a line to follow, but Pasquale does not seem to want the river to get between…

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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.