The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

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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It is a pity that I didn’t have a video camera with me to capture the motion in this puddle. The wind was blowing in from the southwest, but the trees that can be seen in the reflection of this puddle were offering some shelter. The half of the puddle nearest the trees was in their lee and receiving little or no wind. The half that was further from the trees was catching a breeze as it dropped down over the trees. The net result was that the muddy bubbles were being corralled into the lee half, where they were also being pushed gently from one side. It set up a gentle, but constant gyre of bubbles in only one half of the puddle. In a very roundabout way, that has some similarities with other lee methods, the dirty bubbles in this puddle are trying to point in the direction…

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The Gooleys were camping on the Isle of Wight over the weekend. It was great weather, the few hours of rain that are necessary to make it feel like proper British camping kept themselves to late at night and early in the morning, which was considerate. A few observations will creep into the blog in due course, but to save me a bit of time as I work to catch up on some emails, below is one that artfully saved me the need to blog properly. Thank you, Rob.

Tristan,

I hope you are well.

Emily and I attended your course at West Dean some months ago, and since then we have spent much time working out north from south based on the “tick” shaped branch formations.

I recall you showing us many pictures of trees and asking us to determine directions based on the tick shape. And I have now something to add…

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My thanks to Richard, who sent in this picture from a lad’s walking weekend along the Jurassic Coast. He was given a private course as a birthday present and was on the lookout for natural signposts. Wind and trees don’t scream direction a lot louder than this. He also spotted sand blown only over the northeastern edge of a horse training area and found Polaris, but then struggled to see it from the inside of a pub.

I try not to let politics enter my mind too much when out walking, but sometimes it helps to be aware of some of the tinkering that the political animals are up to. In the interests of the environment farmers are discouraged from working the land right up to the edge of woodland. They can set some of this land aside, typically a strip up to 8m, and be compensated for it through the government’s Entry Level Stewardship scheme.

The farmers are finely tuned into what is and is not productive land, they know from experience the parts of their fields that are not high-yielding. This will very often coincide with the areas that the sun does not reach fully, the shadows on the north side of tall trees for example. There is a bias towards finding these ‘buffer strips’ on the northern side of woodland, at the southern edge…

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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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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 spotted these blazes and been reunited with his kin. He will…

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I came across this story this morning about a pet dog, Sophie Tucker, that was washed overboard in rough conditions during a sailing holiday off the Australian coast and swam five miles to the small uninhabited island of St Bees.

The story focuses on the distance swum, which is incredible enough, but makes no mention of how the dog found the island. We can rule out vision, because she would not have been able to see further than about twenty feet in front of her in those conditions. Even in flat calm a dog would barely able to see the tops of trees five miles away because of the curvature of the earth’s surface.

Smell is the most likely solution, but that points to an even tougher dog, because to follow the smell of land she would have had to swim into the wind and waves, which would have been horrific.

Another hard…

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This morning brought with it a nice thick radiation fog, which the sun will probably burn off soon. There is not forecast to be much wind today, but even a breeze deals with radiation fog, usually anything over 12 knots.

No visible sun, no discernible wind, these are the conditions that remind us that the trees reflect their environment over a long period. They act as a giant USB stick of data about thousands of days of sun and wind. All we need to do is tune our senses and look for it. The thin branch in the bottom left of the picture has been curved upwards by the prevailing southwest winds over time.

I have found myself at airports a lot recently and it occurred to me that there is not very much to inspire those interested in nature about them in general. It does sometimes take a bit of lateral thinking to spot the clues in places like that.

Some man-made structures can give us a clue to help us on our way until nature comes to our aid again. Churches are a good example. A lot of churches are aligned East-West and this can offer a short term hand if all else is proving confusing, not unusual in a built-up area. The problem with a lot of artificial clues like this though is that they are very short-lived, they offer a clue for a few seconds or minutes at best, but then disappear out of sight and leave the navigator on their own again. Airports, with a little lateral and logical thinking,…

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