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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The third Condry Festival, ‘Nature and Outdoor Writing at its Finest’, took place on Saturday at the Tabernacl in Machynlleth, Wales. I was honoured to be invited to speak and it was a wonderful opportunity to spend some time in the company of those whose passion and dedication to understanding the natural world have set them apart. I listened to talks by Jack Grasse, Ian Wright, Jim Perrin, John Fanshawe and Andrew McNeillie. I learned a very great deal and enjoyed the process hugely.

Machynlleth is the right size for a small town and it holds some peculiar charms. There was an alternative taste evident in some of the shops and a vibrant liberal feel to the air. A source, who shall remain nameless, informed me that Machynlleth is the ‘lesbian capital of Wales’. I was in no position to argue with such an assertion, ill-equipped as I am with…

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Tom Vanderbilt, the journalist and best-selling author of ‘Traffic‘, flew over from the States to join me in Dartmoor last week for a taste of natural navigation in the wild.

His account will be appearing in the US magazine, ‘Outside‘, in due course so I won’t spoil the fun here, but I will write it up and publish it on this website once Tom’s Outside article has run. Suffice to say that Dartmoor did not pull any punches and a meteorologically intense time was enjoyed.

The Natural Navigator book is being published in the US on 1st January 2011.

A detailed review of the book has just been published on Nick Gallop’s Skills for Wild Lives website, which is well worth a visit anyway. (Image courtesy of his website).

Yesterday afternoon I was driving back home from Chichester when the car took over and lead me to the West Stoke car park. This wild places book has had a bewitching effect. Was it a case of many a true word spoken in jest in my entry yesterday? I really did not expect to find myself at Kingley Vale, one of the nominated ‘wild places’, as soon as a few hours after writing it.

Walking for a couple of hours from sunlight to dusk and beyond, there were plenty of rich natural navigation clues and I studied them briefly and took pictures that will appear in this blog over time, but yesterday was not really about navigating. Sometimes when studying anything with nature at its heart it feels important to leave the cerebral, academic hat at home and just wonder. My frost-rich walk yesterday was one of those…

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