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 definitely new territory.

In the Amazon there are ‘negative’ geoglyphs, formed by digging ditches, often up to 4m deep – ‘negative’ only in the sense that something has been removed. In other parts to the world there are positive geoglyphs where shapes are formed by building up from the ground, using stones or similar.

You can imagine that my ears pricked more than a little when the anthropologist being interviewed, explained that the hundreds of shapes they had found in the Amazon were mostly aligned north-south. A little light digging of my own revealed this to be a far-from isolated example, many of the worlds geoglyphs are aligned with the cardinal points.

This is definitely not coincidental. The most likely explanation for geoglyphs, even when the exact explanation is elusive – as in the Amazon, is that there is a religious/spiritual explanation for these mammoth land sculptures. Once more there is the temptation to ask the question: “How did these old and technologically-basic civilisations manage to create architecture on near-perfect north-south lines.” This question is quite natural, but it is to misunderstand one important part of the ancient world: the sky.

Historically, most divine worship has looked upwards and outwards at least a little. The sky forms part of many ancient cultures’ creeds. From here it is simply a case of realising that the way the sky appears to behave and the directions we know as north, south, east and west and just two sides of the same coin. Anyone who spends time admiring the patterns in the day and night sky will come to know north, south, east and west, even if they use different words, because these are labels for the changes we see in the sky. East and west are the average directions of sunrise and sunset, wherever you are in the world, and north and south are the anchors of the night sky – the only two places where the stars cease their restlestness, the world over.

In the picture above we are looking at a geoglyph called the Paracas Candalabra in Chile. It is aligned almost perfectly north-south and can be seen from miles out to sea. There are a few more very good examples of geoglyphs here.

A False Temptation

I cover the idea above from a similar angle in my book, The Natural Navigator:

“There is sometimes a temptation to think that this is all a remarkable coincidence: how extraordinary that the sun should happen to sit neatly on certain lines, like north or south, at certain times, or that it should happen to rise exactly east or set west at others. It is, however, a false temptation, because the cardinal directions and the motion of celestial objects, including the sun, are just different ways of looking at the same thing…”

The astronomical explanations for all of the above can be found in the simple, and yet rich and revealing, revolution of the Earth on its axis and its orbit around the sun. Geoglpyhs are aligned with respect to the axis of the Earth’s rotation. Not because its architects were aware of such a motion, but because the sky betrays it.

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 Ithacan coastline.

After a quick swim at Dafnoudi we decided to head across to Ithaca, the land of Odysseus, and explore the beaches there. It was a little over 3 miles to the northern promontory of Ithaca, but I only know this now because I have researched it and I only researched it because we nearly didn’t get there. Yes, I know, there is a better order to researching journeys and undertaking them, but Greek islands have such a wicked way of mixing our ideas concerning being careless and being carefree.

Almost all small boat journeys in hired boats are done by line-of-sight navigation in these waters, from one landmark to the next. No proper charts, no compasses, no GPS. The distances are small and the visibility is usually pretty good.

On the late morning in question, the visibility was actually quite poor, a languid mist hugged the sea and the lower land. The photo above should give a fair taste of how the sea, land and sky like to merge a little in these conditions.

About five minutes after setting off two things in quick succession made me realise my massive and embarrassing mistake. The first was that I became subconsciously (through a feeling of unease) and then consciously aware that the sun was not where I was expecting it. I had grown used to seeing and feeling it dominate the southern half of the landscape as we pottered south, east and west. The only time we ever headed north for any serious time was when motoring back home from a foray to a southern beach.

The problem was that we were supposed to be heading east to Ithaca and yet the sun was nowhere to be seen. It should have been peeking below the canopy to my right and roasting my right cheek. It was not. What’s more I suddenly realised that I could feel it on the back of my neck.

This sudden dawning – I should say ‘near-middaying’ – made me scour the mist soaked land ahead with much keener interest than I had before. Then I saw a lighthouse where I was not expecting to see one.

‘Oh my God!’ I said out loud.

‘What’s wrong?’ My wife asked, with a voice that suggested that she did not want to know too many details if we were in serious danger.

‘We’re heading for completely the wrong island. We’re heading towards Lefkada!’

Lefkada is another neighbour of Kefalonia, but it is north of the island, not east, and at least another mile further away.

I corrected our course by a mere 100 degrees and half an hour later we were swimming on a beautiful deserted Ithacan beach. It was a bonus that this beach was deserted as I needed time to let my blushes subside.

“Leaves at the bottom of a tree are often larger on the shadier North side to make the most of available light. This is often the case in Sycamore. They will also be darker due to the high concentrations of chlorophyll.”

From now on, I’ll be on the lookout for these shady characters. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Andrew has a bushcraft blog which is well worth checking out here.

I took some photos of the results of my moon shadow stick, together with a perfect north-south line, which I will be using on my Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation courses. Yes, that is a bit of a tease, but those who come on the courses part with £105 and I make sure that it includes plenty of exclusive material, not least dozens of images that cannot be seen anywhere else.

As compensation, I have posted these photos that I also took yesterday, of snow clinging in long thin strips to the southeast side of the tall beech trees.

The snow has finally begun to thaw in this freezing microclimatic corner of West Sussex, but I did manage a fair amount of stomping around in the snow over the past week. This is a picture I took in my local beech woodland a couple of days ago.

Lichens are very sensitive to their environment – moisture levels and air quality in particular – but also the surface they grow on. This means that they can be used to understand direction, but a little local knowledge and familarity with the stones and barks of your area helps greatly.

There is a rust-coloured lichen that is clearly not keen on surfaces that dry regularly and can be found on the moist sides of many trees in southern England, not least beech trees.

It is a reasonably dependable indicator of north on trees that are open to at least some drying from sunlight.

(If there are any lichenologists out there that might be able to point me to the right page of the ‘Mosses and Liverworts of Britain and Ireland Field Guide’ for this particular friend I’d be very grateful.)

I set off as the last light from the sun faded in the southwest. Cassiopeia and Cygnus neatly sketched out north for me, even when Polaris was well hidden. When moving south I used Jupiter and Aquila.

Four hours later I returned, having spent nearly all of it alone, in beech woodland and without using a torch. Moving at times with my left hand extended out to fend off inquisitive lower branches, I covered about six miles; this was no race.

In every woodland walk there are times when you feel the forest is on your side and times when it is inviting you to make haste the exit. When the sun has gone down, the trees never lose their ability to thrill and scare.

The only light I used all night was the single flash from my camera to catch my nemesis. I closed and shielded my eyes, to protect my night vision, and then pointed the camera and ‘shot blind’. This picture, which I did not look at until reaching the end of my walk, must have been of some ogre, a menacing hunched figure, one who crouched silently by the path of those who were foolish to walk alone at night in the woods. Turns out it was a tree stump.

Or perhaps it only turned into a tree stump when my camera came out? Heisenberg wrote of stranger things and called them physics.

The heat seems to have abated a little, but the sun has left its great big footprints all over the countryside. The baked earth is cracked and fissures run along paths and the edges of the fields, more on the northern side than the southern.

The grass of our garden lawn is doing its best to betray both the sun’s arc and the motion of the trees’ shadows during the course of the day. The lawn is a patchwork of varying shades of green and brown, but it is not random and tells a story of heat and shade that is rooted in the direction of the sun.

At this time of year the sun lights up the countryside in early morning and late evening in a way that is unique. The light pours in from low in the northeastern and northwestern sky. This picture could not be taken at any other time, as the morning light is filtered through gaps in the woods to the northeast of where I live. It lights up strips and leaves the rest of the fields in shade.

A belated thanks to everyone who came to my talks and walks at the North Kent Walking Festival and the Travel Bookshop last week.

The stick’s shadow should tell you which compass is still accurate and also very roughly what time of day the picture was taken. Which compass is still working, why and when was the picture taken?

The answers will appear here after a few tantalising days!