The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

Happy New Year!

I do not share everything in this blog, you will be pleased to know. Most matters familial and ablutionary are kept from these pages.

So too are exact locations from time to time. It is not usually necessary to pinpoint the precise spot where a natural navigation technique revealed itself, or to give a 16 figure grid reference of the perch from which a photograph was taken.

Sometimes, I must confess that I deliberately fail, as unostentatiously as possible, to reveal even a general location if I am keen not to encourage visitors for any reason. This is rare, but it does happen. I have walked on certain routes in the Lake District and felt guilty for having let my boots join the millions of others that etch too deeply into these rocks at times. The guilt would worsen if I then added in any way to…

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Thank you to Andrew Boe, who has dropped me line explaining something that I have not noticed before:

“Leaves at the bottom of a tree are often larger on the shadier North side to make the most of available light. This is often the case in Sycamore. They will also be darker due to the high concentrations of chlorophyll.”

From now on, I’ll be on the lookout for these shady characters. Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Andrew has a bushcraft blog which is well worth checking out here.

I recently came across this short video by Michael Barton. It contains a neat natural navigation tip and bushcraft at its most fun. Click on the image below to watch the video.

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…

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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…

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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…

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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’…

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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…

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