The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

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.

The sun has reached its northernmost bus stop, it has put on the handbrake for a second and has now, already, begun its journey back south.

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.

There is a good photo of the Great Lettuce, Lactuca Virosa, with its leaves aligned north-south on the Adur Wild Flower website. If you do use this to find your way then make sure you don’t eat too much of it as it is reputed to have psychotropic qualities. You are likely to head off in the right direction, walk in a circle and then find yourself back in the same spot, shouting something like, ‘Great Lettuce, Batman!’ I digress.

One of the keys to navigating with nature is appreciating scale. It is vital that we do not spend too much time focusing too narrowly or widely. In this photograph, taken in the South Downs on Monday, our eyes are naturally led to the fallen tree. It would be very easy to miss both a bigger clue to direction and a smaller one.

The heart of the tree is marginally closer to our side of the tree, which hints that we are south of it, looking north.

If we peer through the undergrowth and bare tree branches we can see that the land falls away to lower country in the distance. The South Downs are a predominantly east/west range of hills and so any time that we can see a long way down into lower land it suggests that we are looking north or south. The hills are also close to the…

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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.

It’s 8.15am this morning out on the Downs and this sheep’s shadow tells us that we are looking south. Her wool, or ’sheep fur’ as some would have it, is blowing from the same direction as the sun and gave me a constant reference all morning.

On a completely unrelated note, there is an article about the RGS in today’s Telegraph that I have somehow appeared in.

Twilight at either end of the day is a good time to look south this month. At dusk Jupiter is the first night object to appear, narrowly but clearly, above the southern horizon. This morning at sunrise Sirius was the last object to disappear, again it was due south. I took these two pictures at 6.30am, one looking east showing the red dawn. The other looking south. It is not a fascinating photo of Sirius but it does at least show that there is nothing else visible around it.

On a tangent, the expression ‘go south’ is often used to mean something is past its best. ‘Tottenham seem to have gone south under Ramos’ influence.’ In the US it was more usually ‘gone west’, but even there south seems to be winning through. If you are something of a verbal sleuth there is a thorough tour of these expressions here.

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For the next six months the sun will always have some south in it when viewed from Britain. It will rise south of east and set south of west until the 20th March 2009. Its shadows must therefore always have some north in them. This picture was taken at 9.35 this morning, by which time the sun is fast approaching south-east and my shadow is well on its way to north-west.

Random fact for the day: sun compasses were still being issued to the military for the first Gulf war in 1991.

The Natural Navigator’s day often starts with a quick check that the sun is rising roughly where it should be – blog readers will be the first to know if it doesn’t! As this picture shows it is not always a chore and the time that our youngest is getting up each morning certainly helps make sure I’m ready.

This will be the last week this year when the sun rises north of east and its change as it heads south each morning (and evening) is at its fastest at this time of year.

This is a picture I took about half an hour ago and it is one of those that might be dismissed by those not trained in the dark arts as a ‘typical English country scene’. With closer inspection it yields navigational fruit aplenty.

The foreground shadow confirms that the sun is no longer visible from this viewpoint, but the direction of the early evening sun is easy to detect from the long shadows in the middle ground. We are therefore looking south.

The smoke from the two fires reveals that the wind is light and variable. In the space of little more than a hundred metres it goes from next to nothing to a light north-easterly breeze.

In the top left of the picture, just above the tree line the south coast sea can just be seen. It is running from left to right, or an east-west line, which is sort of what…

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