The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I’m just back from some micronavigation in the Black Mountains in Wales.

I should get a chance to blog in more detail in time, but for now I just wanted to share a couple of nice clues I found in the light snow and ice I walked amongst.

The first photo shows the first snow I encountered on a climb out of the Vale of Ewyas. We are looking east in this picture, the only snow to have survived the thawing warmth of the day are the thin strips hiding in the shade on the south side of the path. This technique is analogous to the one using puddles on the south side of west-east tracks.

The sunlight can be seen lighting the hillside in the background and unsurprisingly there is little snow to be found there. It is only in the shadows that it survives on the lower…

Read More...

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…

Read More...

OK, it’s confession time. Again.

I’m just back from a week’s holiday with my wife on the Greek island of Kefalonia. It was our first holiday without the kids for about seven years, which felt bizarre from start to finish. This is the only, admittedly weak, excuse for the navigational lapse that ensued.

In Fiskardo, at the northern end of Kefalonia, we hired a small day-boat and spent many mornings motoring up and down the east coast of Kefalonia. We pursued the not very stressful business of hunting quiet bays and seeking secluded beaches for a swim.

On the fifth morning we putt-putted all the way round the northern Kefalonian coast to a beach at the northern tip of the island called, Dafnoudi beach.

We had spent almost all of the week on the east coast of the Kefalonia looking across the water, to the east, and seeing the beautiful…

Read More...

Natural navigation is at its most fun when it is a puzzle and a test of our senses. Have a look at this photo and get ready to test your powers of observation.

This is a photo of a monkey puzzle tree that I have been growing in our greenhouse since early this year. I have taken it out of the greenhouse for better light for this photo. Greenhouses are great places to study the effect of sunlight on plant growth because all the wind effects are cancelled.

Now see if you can tell in which direction this photo was taken. Are we looking north, south, east or west?

Answer time…

In this photo we are looking west. The monkey puzzle tree has grown towards the southern light to the left, an effect known as ‘phototropism’.

‘That’s easy!’ I hear some of you cry, but I did warn you that…

Read More...

Finding South Using the Stars

In the northern hemisphere Polaris, the North Star, tends to get all the attention when it comes to finding direction using the stars. There is a good reason for this: it is easy to find and is very accurate. In the southern hemisphere the Southern Cross is used to find south and Polaris is not visible. But what about finding south in the northern hemisphere? The easiest thing is still to find Polaris and then look in the opposite direction, but what if we want a method that actually shows us south itself. Here is a nice simple and very unusual method that I invented a few years ago, which you can try this evening.

First you need to find the constellation Leo. It is a nice, big and easy to identify constellation which, unlike some constellations I can think of, looks at least…

Read More...

Last night I divided my time between two very different arenas of the modern human experience. I watched dross on TV, including some Jonathan Dross himself, but then I found the antidote to such inanity. I nipped out regularly to put markers down in the snow, as I watched the moon’s shadows march west across the white.

I took some photos of the results of my moon shadow stick, together with a perfect north-south line, which I will be using on my Beginner’s Guide to Natural Navigation courses. Yes, that is a bit of a tease, but those who come on the courses part with £105 and I make sure that it includes plenty of exclusive material, not least dozens of images that cannot be seen anywhere else.

As compensation, I have posted these photos that I also took yesterday, of snow clinging in long thin strips to the…

Read More...

There is no better way to get a feel for botany than to grow something from seed. By the time a plant is even a few feet high it is displaying such a myriad of often complex developments that unweaving them can be fiendishly difficult. Watching a plant grow from day one it is much easier to spot these developments taking place. Nothing could be more satisfying than watching a fruit ripen towards the end of this process.

This Santa Fe Grande Chilli has ripened more quickly on its warmer, southern side. Another instance where my chilli plants have done their best to turn themselves into a natural compass.

We are bearing down on stargazing-season. It is getting dark early enough in the evenings, staying dark long enough in the mornings and doesn’t yet freeze you for the privilege.

This morning I enjoyed a view of Orion, Sirius, Leo, which has just marched ahead of the dawn sun now, and a few other players. I took this photo of Orion’s Sword hanging down to the left (eastern) side of a large beech tree and dangling down towards the south, as it does. The ‘smudge’ in the middle is the Great Nebula in Orion, also known less romantically as ‘M42′. It is a ‘stellar nursery’ where new stars are born. Would a more appropriate term not be a ‘stellar maternity ward’?

On a different subject, my best wishes and good luck to Kevin Shannon who is attempting a zero-emissions circumnavigation of the globe. He asked me for my thoughts,…

Read More...

My thanks to Kevan Hubberd for sending in the idea about using Orion’s Sword as a way of finding south.

Orion’s Sword can be seen in the image to the left as the short vertical line of ‘stars’ under Orion’s Belt.

The Sword does indeed point to a spot on the horizon that is close to due south when the Sword is near vertical (as in this image), but it is a less dependable guide when it is well off-vertical, ie. when it is lower in the sky.

Technical bit for natural navigation zealots only: The reason that the Sword is more accurate when vertical is that it makes a line in the sky that is parallel to the line towards the south celestial pole. When vertical this line intersects with the horizon at a point very close to due south, but at times when the sword is closer…

Read More...

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.