The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

This photo, from my recent and gallette-packed French summer holiday, shows the distinctive orange lichens that have daubed a southern-facing wall of Suscinio Castle in Brittany.

Being a coastal region, Brittany is a natural home for these orange Xanthoria lichens, which can be both a blessing and curse when it comes to using them to understand direction. This is because conditions need to be close to perfect for lichens to thrive, but if they are too good then a lichen will manage well on more than one side, and occasionally on all sides.

This nuance creates a challenge for those new to the subject of natural navigation, including those who took part in the upcoming BBC2 series, ‘All Roads Lead Home’. Sue Perkins, in particular, was understandably frustrated that the lichens would not always obey a perfect rule in terms of the aspect they preferred. In the very short time…

Read More...

After an intense week of scouting in northwest Ireland with the BBC last week, I felt a little weary come Saturday morning. We had covered almost all of the largest island of the coast of Ireland, Achill Island in County Mayo, and then zoomed about Ballycroy and a few other places too. A couple of days mucking about would have been nice, but instead I had to get the first draft of my new book to my publisher’s by this morning. Tomorrow I’m off to Cornwall with Zoe Timmers from the Beeb again. One of those busy times, but all the small discoveries make the hecticness worthwhile.

In this picture we are looking east in Ballycroy National Park. Notice how the two sides of this drainage ditch look very different. The darker left side of the ditch, that is the south-facing northern side, is covered in a thick…

Read More...

The two pictures above show two sides of the same bridleway signpost on the South Downs Way. The arrows both point east and there is a clue to this in the photos. It is not in the lichen growth, which unusually is quite similar on both sides, but in the colour of the arrows themselves. The blue of the south-facing (but east-pointing!) arrow has been bleached more by the sun. The three main weathering clues are sun, wind and rain. The first will usually be greatest on the southern side, but wind and rain will usually leave their marks more prominently on the southwestern side.

The rape flowers are coming into bloom over the South Downs, but they don’t all bloom at the same time.

The crop tends to be on a field that will get a good amount of sunlight anyway, often south-facing, but even within the fields there are subtle shade differences. The flowers tend to appear first in the south-facing dips in the land. This is probably because they are getting plenty of sun, but being sheltered from the cooling winds. As a general rule, nature moves faster the warmer things are.

A walk in the woods yesterday revealed some natural and unnatural clues.

This primrose, the only one in the area, was unsurprisingly in a south-facing spot. The thick bed of south-facing moss that surrounds it on the beech roots should not surprise us. Moss grows in abundance close to the ground where moisture levels remain generally high, even in south-facing places.

The technique of trail blazing, marking trees to show others the way is ancient, but the chalk markings on this beech tree were a little disconcerting. Apologies, the picture is out of focus as I was hurrying to catch up with others, but hopefully you can make out the following: arrows showing the way, the words, ‘Tom’ and ‘This Way’ and a picture of a sad, perhaps perplexed or even angry face. Hopefully Tom is less sad now, having…

Read More...

When talking about heat and wind in the context of chillies, there is a risk that we might start to think some very un-navigational thoughts…

… however, this is a risky business, so here are two jalapeno chillies. One lived its life in a south-facing greenhouse, the other lived near it, outside near a south-facing wall. They both received identical amounts of sunlight. They both grew in the same soil and received plenty of water. The only serious differences to their environments were the temperature and wind exposure.

It is not too hard to see that nature is quite fussy about its environment and it is this fussiness that can give us a helping hand. It is sometimes possible to deduce useful things about the elements from two examples of the same species. One big example of this can sometimes be found in the different look and feel of two…

Read More...