The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Last night I caught a few minutes of a programme on BBC4, called ‘Unnatural Histories.’

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…

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I was interviewed by Susan Gray on behalf of the Ramblers yesterday. We chatted over tea, blasts of icy December air and then some more tea. Did you know that the amount of tea walkers drink is inversely-proportional to the number of days we are from the winter solstice?

We only went for a short walk, it was more of an indoor interview than a walking one, but we were outdoors just long enough to appreciate the difference a couple of hundred feet of altitude can make. In the valleys it was far from balmy, but it was a pleasant temperature that did not draw attention to itself. On the tops of the South Downs, there was grimacing aplenty and the sandwiches we had planned to eat en route stayed in the rucksacks to be taken back down to the village of Houghton Bridge, whence they had come. The…

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It would be true to say that I would not be writing this blog if the sun rose in the same place each day. I don’t mean that in a very general sense, it’s not because the whole world would be very different and maybe the dinosaurs would have survived and humans would never have evolved, blah, blah…

No, it is because in the spring of 2008 I was busy trying to work out whether there was any point in trying to make a living by teaching natural navigation, or not. Whether, perhaps, that was the stupidest idea I had ever had, a competition with some depth in the field. The problem was that there was no ‘sensible’ way of deciding whether to go ahead with it or not. There was no point bouncing the idea off family, bank managers, priests or ouija boards. The answers that would come back…

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These two photographs were taken this morning, within a few seconds of each other and from exactly the same spot. In the book I touch on the difference between viewing mist horizontally and vertically and these pictures illustrate the point nicely.

Mist and fog, which is just a word for intense mist, are low visibility caused by looking through millions of suspended water particles. When we look horizontally we have to look through hundreds of metres of these particles and the effect is very poor visibility. But since the mist often sits in a thin blanket that hugs the land, the story is very different when we look vertically upwards. (Or downwards if you are a pilot searching for somewhere to land.)

Looking upwards it is often possible to find clouds, as in the second picture, and if you have remained tuned to the direction the clouds are moving,…

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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…

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We spend most of our time looking horizontally. This morning was a misty one and looking out across the fields the mist felt thick and soup-like. Whenever the mist or fog settles in it is worth taking a moment to look up.

When we look vertically up we usually see the mist at its thinnest and it can sometimes be a pleasant surprise to realise that far from being completely smothered we’re actually in a thin blanket. This is a lesson that all pilots learn at some stage, usually with a little adrenalin mixed in.

It is not unusual in a light aircraft to fly over your airfield and look down through a thin mist to see the runways clearly, only to find that a minute later the slanting angle back to the runway can make the whole airfield ‘disappear’ – a real pulse-raiser the first few times it…

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What sort of person comes on your courses?

All sorts! Those who enjoy fresh air and have an open mind. So far there have been artists, soldiers, writers, walkers, Navy officers, drainage engineers, lawyers, physicists, ecologists, accountants, marketing people, IT people, financiers, an RAF Navigator, fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, farmers, pilots, actors, sailors, builders, midwives… No astronauts yet, but it’s still early days.