Stone Age satnav: Did ancient man use 5,000-year-old travel chart to navigate across Britain?

Great story in the Daily Mail today.

I really enjoyed this article on the BBC website, lamenting the ‘hollow preparation’ currently needed for A levels. They don’t make them like they used to!

It refers to a Reform group report that claims no ‘independent study’ or ‘original thought’ is required for the exams,  and likens them to sat-nav as opposed to map-reading. By extrapolation, natural navigation must only be for the most original and indendent of thinkers!

President Obama was visibly furious with his British escort team after his secure cavalcade accidentally drove into the tiny Devon village of Clovelly. The armour-plated vehicles were too wide for the narrow cobbled streets and became wedged. Locals of the picturesque, but sleepy fishing village were woken by the sound of police motorbikes and two helicopters overhead. One resident told us, ‘Mr Obama was clearly upset, but we gave him a nice cup of tea and some homemade biscuits and that seemed to settle him.’ Mrs Avril, from the tourist board thought that it was due to the lead driver following his SatNav, ‘One of the policemen seemed very irate, he ripped a gadget off his motorbike and was jumping up and down on it. I told him he should have realised that he was heading the wrong way just by looking at the sun! That upset him even more…

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During a mild tidying effort this morning I came close to throwing out the Jan/Feb issue of Navigation News, but then spotted something that I had originally overlooked. A news item that hinted that the role of GPS in our lives may be waning:

‘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!