The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Another enjoyable Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course at the RGS yesterday. In attendance: a patent attorney, paraglider pilot, academic, film maker, doctor, retiree, vet, town planner and optical assistant to name a few.

Among the off-piste topics that we discussed there was talk of whether we sleep better aligned North-South than we do East-West and also the idea that the expression, ‘follow your nose’ may have some science behind it: humans have iron oxide in their sinuses which may account for some experiments that have shown a magnetic sense of direction in humans.

Lest I forget, I will be giving a series of talks to launch my book in March. The date and venue for my talk at the Oxford Literary Festival has been confirmed:

Wednesday 24/3 12:00, further details and tickets available here.

Hope to see you there!

A thick cold damp mist is bogged in over the South Downs this morning. I haven’t been out much this week as I seem to have been zooming up and down the A roads to the Royal Geographical Society and back. On Monday night it was the last president, Prof Sir Gordon Conway’s farewell lecture followed by a black tie dinner with the new President, Michael Palin CBE. Good food for mind and body and, as always at the RGS, great company and stories round the tables.

Yesterday I gave my Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course for another wonderfully diverse gang. A smattering of walkers, pilots and sailors, but among them a filmmaker, mum, banker, psychiatrist, gardener, construction engineer and designer.

The RGS is always a fun place to spend the day, but it had an unusual and slightly surreal feel to it yesterday as there was a conference going on…

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On Saturday I was invited to give an introductory natural navigation course on one of the walks organised by Louise Gorst. Louise has been leading walks in East Sussex for four years and has earned a large and loyal following for her ‘Soles and Souls’ walking days.

Twenty-one of us headed out on a glorious circuit from the ‘Sussex Ox’ pub in Milton Street, near Eastbourne. We headed up Wilmington Hill and stopped along the way to look very briefly into the use of the sun, wind, clouds, land, sea, trees and buildings. One of the great things about natural navigation is that it never gets between a walker and the outdoor experience,  it never detracts from fantastic views or great dollops of sunshine, but helps us to connect with them in a new way.

Ideal for those who like their walking to come with a sense of reflection or an insight into…

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Many thanks to Tessa for this email. Uplifting story and so much more real than some of the dusty books about ancient astronomy that I have been reading recently…

Hi Tristan,

I very much enjoyed the Natural Navigation course last week and am certainly much more aware of the position of the sun every day than I was before.

As I was walking the dog this morning  it came to mind that but for an awareness of natural navigation by my father I might not be here!  My father was in POW camp in Italy during the war and was being moved by train into Germany towards the end of the war. The prisoners were transferred from one train to another and my father and two others managed to hide under the train where they stayed until it was dark.  They then walked back to England finding their way back by using the stars as of course they…

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An engaging group for the Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation course at the Royal Geographical Society yesterday. Diverse in age and interests as always. When we were discussing the difference in the sun’s behaviour between the solstices and equinox it felt more poignant that we are so close to the autumnal equinox itself. We looked at a model of the Earth orbiting the sun, then shifted our attention to shadows. A couple of days ago I took advantage of the sunshine to practice what I preach.

This chalk line in this picture shows the shadow tips joined over a period of a few hours on the morning of the 21st September. The line comes very close to a straight line, but even on the equinox it is never a perfectly straight line – unless you happen to be standing on the equator when the sun would rise due east, pass directly…

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I have just been sent some photos from a private course I ran in the South Downs on Friday afternoon. The three navigators were Dom, Rog and Hamish, all of South African heritage. Hamish can be seen here, fighting his way through the best that the South Downs can offer in the way of ‘bush’. We discussed many things during the course, some of them wonderfully off-topic, including Zulus and radioactive aliens.

Someone mentioned that tennis courts have to be aligned a certain way to be LTA approved and so I thought I’d try to investigate this interesting notion. Google Earth shows the courts at Wimbledon to be aligned close to North/South, but with a definite northwest/southeast component. If anyone knows more about this then answers on a postcard – if you live in the nineteenth century – or email if you don’t, please.

During the Beginner’s Guide course at West Dean College today we watched a few minutes from the unique film, ‘The Navigators’.

The film is about Mau Pialug, one of a very small number of Pacific Islanders still skilled in using traditional Pacific navigation methods. He explains his use of the stars and swell and demonstrates the methods using rocks on the beach, before embarking on an epic voyage without using instruments.

Mau Pialug went on to play an important role in the founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, a non-profit organisation dedicated to preserving the traditional navigation methods.