The natural Navigation: The Right Course, Naturally

I was interviewed by Susan Gray on behalf of the Ramblers yesterday. We chatted over tea, blasts of icy December air and then some more tea. Did you know that the amount of tea walkers drink is inversely-proportional to the number of days we are from the winter solstice?

We only went for a short walk, it was more of an indoor interview than a walking one, but we were outdoors just long enough to appreciate the difference a couple of hundred feet of altitude can make. In the valleys it was far from balmy, but it was a pleasant temperature that did not draw attention to itself. On the tops of the South Downs, there was grimacing aplenty and the sandwiches we had planned to eat en route stayed in the rucksacks to be taken back down to the village of Houghton Bridge, whence they had come. The…

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UPDATE:

My sources tell me that the first is a Magpie Inkcap (Coprinopsis picaceus) and the second is Green Elf Cup/Wood cup/Stain (Chlorociboria aeruginascens).

My thanks, in no particular order, to: Nick Weston, Brian and Ross Gardner.

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A thousand apologies for that title.

Seriously now, are there any fungi experts out there?

Yesterday I came across these two rather fun specimens during a family walk in our local woods. Thought one was a Panther cap, but looks a bit too ‘pointy’ for that. The blue one is beautiful, but not one I can even guess at. I’m assuming it is a fungus, but could be a lichen at a stretch I suppose?

If anyone knows someone in the know please could you waft these images under their expert noses. Much obliged. Credit will be given. My email address is here.

On a different subject, my thanks…

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Great to see so many willing to take on the heat of the summer on Sunday at the Uckfield Festival.

My day started with a breakfast interview with Barry Horsham at Uckfield FM, but then it was time for a four hour natural navigation walk in the Barcombe area. Thanks to Bernard Tagliavini for organising it and to everyone who came on the walk, it was a baking day but we tried to find patches of shade to stand in as we studied the trees, the clouds, mosses, lichens and the sun itself. We even found ourselves discussing Pacific sailors as we watched the ripples in a stream. (The ripples were less dependable in the areas where teenagers had been forced into the water by the midday heat for a wild swim.)

Something that I had not noticed before was that there appeared to be a much greater number…

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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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We had some old friends staying this weekend and decided to laugh in the general direction of the forecasts and go for a walk in the woods. It was dry for half an hour, but then the clouds moving over our heads, and visible in the gaps between the near-bare trees, changed their scudding direction by almost ninety degrees. This was the starting gun for a predicted and yet sudden change in our weather fortunes. We turned at our halfway point, the 18th century Nore Folly perched at the edge of the woods and looking out over Slindon and the south coast. The rain came down hard, and then harder still and then the hail came too. The upside of such weather is that you don’t have to be cold and wet for long before you feel you have earned a three course Sunday lunch and hours spent reading…

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