The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

For the past few evenings I have been heading out into the Downs to find a good spot to keep watch out to the west. A sunset is always worth a walk, but there is rarer game worth hunting for in the skies at the moment. Unfortunately the clouds came in at the last minute last night and obscured Venus and Mercury again.

Such a shame, it would have been an unusually good opportunity to catch them going to bed together. Fear not, I have a near foolproof plan for spotting them and shall report back with my results. If, over the next few days, you do catch a clear sky and setting sun, hold tight and wait for the two bright beacons that will follow the sun down.

There was a review of the book in Easter’s Sunday Telegraph.

I’ve just found out that the May 2009 BBC Countryfile episode where I took Jules Hudson for a taste of natural navigation in the South Downs has been uploaded to YouTube.

I went for a walk in the South Downs yesterday afternoon. The air was cold, there were still chunks of ice lining the north-facing side of chalk ruts in the path. The sun was up for the first part of the walk and made direction-finding easy. When it fell below the hills to my southwest it gave different opportunities. One of my favourite dusk techniques is to use the light reflections of cloud edges to gauge where the sun must be behind higher ground. This photograph from 4.30pm yesterday shows this effect quite clearly. The sun is reaching the far ground, trees and clouds, but it does not light the clouds equally. The bright edges act almost as a parabola, pointing the way back to a now invisible sun.

The picture was taken looking northeast. The very perceptive will have noticed that there are molehills in the foreground and that they…

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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 had hoped to sail to the Isle of Wight on Saturday with some old friends. We slipped Chichester marina at eight in the morning in my Contessa 32, fully aware that the forecast was a bit spicy. The sense of foreboding increased slightly when the Chichester marina lock-keeper called down to me, ‘Have you seen the forecast?’ I said ‘Yes. Force 6 gusting 9.’ He replied, ‘OK, well when the lock gates open you will need to gun the engine full throttle and hold your line otherwise you will be blown straight onto the piles.’ I thanked him and felt a small surge of adrenaline.

We made our way out into the harbour and at times it was hard to hear each other speaking as the wind whistled past our ears. After an hour I decided that we ought to swallow our pride and return to the marina and postpone the…

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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.

I ran a private course in the South Downs on Saturday for a group of four friends. One of them gave me a great example of using our senses and a little lateral thought to better connect with nature. Rachel lives southwest of Medway power station and said that she could tell when it was going to snow in winter because these were the only times she could smell the power station itself. The colder northeasterly winds bringing snowy weather and local smells with them.

I ran a small private course yesterday and enjoyed a wonderfully ironic moment. It was almost embarrassing.

The first half of the day was spent indoors studying the theory, looking at photographs and playing with celestial models. One of the points I am always keen to make is about the relationship between the uses of our senses and wayfinding. Sight is so often under-rated because its use is so immediately obvious, but we rarely acknowledge how much detail is allowed to escape. For example, we have evolved to identify things by shape much more readily than by colour or shade. Our brains tend to identify an object as a tree, ie. not a threat, and then move on to processing other information without noticing the subtle differences in shades of the leaves at all. Sometimes it pays to rein it in, to force it to focus and to analyse some of…

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