Raven-Floki and the Wayfinding Birds of Old

Another frosty morning and the birds seem particularly active. Whenever I see dark birds in a cold setting I am reminded of the Raven-Floki tale.

Floki Vilgerdarson was a Norwegian Viking and one of the first of his countrymen to set foot on Iceland. One method he used of wayfinding was to take ravens with him and then release them. By watching their behaviour, Floki was able to divine the proximity and direction of land.

According to legend, he released three birds, the first went nowhere, the second took off and then returned to his ship, but the third raven flew on ahead. Floki followed this raven and found the cold island he had set out for. After settling there, Floki climbed to the top of a mountain from where he could see a fjord filled with ice on the other side. He gave the new land a name, 'Isafjordur', which became our Iceland.

Floki's method was part of a long nautical tradition of using birds to find land. One that most people will have come across, perhaps without realising it, as it appears in universal religious texts going back over two millennia. Noah sent out a raven and a dove from his ark and there are references to the same method in a Buddhist text from the 5th century BC.

The Lure of Kingley Vale

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 times. The path led into the forest of ancient yew trees, many over 500 years old and some dating back 2000 years. There is a cliche that I will try to resist and fail, about saplings growing here as a famous young man went about his day in the Middle East.

The Vale filled with shrieks and yelps and the path emerged above a frozen pond that some young boys were attacking with heavy branches and logs. Climbing steeply the hills rolled down into a light mist that nearly obscured the shining spring tide of the harbour. The track curved back back on itself as it traced the high spine of the hills and the light pinks to the southwest reluctantly yielded to cold dark blues. A plaque on a boulder commemorated the naturalist Sir Arthur George Tansley and Venus shone brightly through the twigs of some bare branches.

It was dark as I passed through another dense tunnel of yew branches and when I emerged at a haunting wooden sculpture, pagan in appearance, the horizon had become crowded with Venus and the two-day-old sickle moon chasing Jupiter and a faint Mercury down to the horizon.

The yellow Capella was the first of the stars to announce itself and by the time I was back at the car it had been joined by hundreds of its friends.

There is a lyric in a song by Elbow:

'One day like this a year'd see me right.'

Roll up, Roll up, Get Your Wild Places Here!

A Christmas present that I hesitate to share, or even share the idea of... is 'Britain and Ireland's Best Wild Places' book. It does exactly what it says on the tin and in an appetising way.

Try this paragraph for size:

'Nothing grows in the shadow of the yews. They preside over empty, shady slopes of flint chalk and their own tindery flakings and droppings. Druids worshipped them and armourers harvested them, but nothing can live with them.'

Before you sigh and mutter that this book will threaten the few remaining wild places, and that my blogging about it isn't helping much either... fear not, I have a plan. Perhaps we could all agree to buy the book, read it and then not visit any of the places in it, satisfying ourselves instead in a cathartic way by just daydreaming of expanses of wonderful wildness? Or, as the collective will collapses, maybe we should just race each other to them and hope we get there before the ice cream vans.

Blindsight

There is an extraordinary story in today's Times. A blind man has navigated his way around an obstacle course without using touch, using a skill known as 'blindsight'.

Winter Solstice

Today is the winter solstice. I would love to give you a long blog entry, but unfortunately this is not possible as I am too busy erecting stones, slaughtering animals, lighting fires, celebrating births and rebirths, feasting, pouring water over heads and the rest. Enjoy.

A Confession

On Monday night I gave my lecture, 'Travel and Exploration: a new direction?' to the Royal Geographical Society. I really enjoyed it, but with about five hundred people in the audience it was fun in a pulse-quickening kind of way. It is time for a little confession.

Last Friday was a full moon and no ordinary full moon either. It was a perigee full moon, when the moon passes closest to the earth and appears a lot larger than normal. On Friday evening it was due to be the largest full moon that we had seen for 50 years. There were also due to be meteors from the Germinid showers.

I am not generally a hugely superstitious creature, although I do enjoy reading about the historical and cultural associations surrounding sky omens. At the end of last week it was easier for me to see how these connections and beliefs have evolved. The talk was very much in my diary and my mind for the days leading up to it and so if truth be told I did not especially welcome unusual celestial goings-on. I was grateful for once that the weather was atrocious and blotted out the sky. I know, this is a sort of vulgar and egotistical navel-gazing, a rather base and vain belief that the moon and meteors could care less what I was up to of a Monday evening.

As it happened the stage did not open up and swallow me, the audience did not metamorphosise into dragons and scorch me with their flames. They gave me a generous round of applause and headed off to the bar in the Map Room for a nip of something to brace against the elements. Even if the omens did not seem portentous on this occasion I think I will forever have a greater sympathy for the historical figures who read so much into them.

The Bird Poo Compass

My camera ventured out with me for a short run this morning, I was feeling confident that I might spot some attractive frost patterns in the trees and hills. The thing that stopped me abrubtly however was less... how shall I put it? Less classically beautiful perhaps... less aesthetically pleasing certainly. I had been taking a shortcut through a patch of woodland, when I noticed something incongruous. The ivy floor of the wood looked unusual. On one side of a young beech tree there were ivy leaves thickly flecked with white bird droppings. Great big dollops of them.

On my courses I encourage people to avoid relying too heavily on memorised 'tricks' and instead to try to remember principles. This was a good example. There was no 'bird poo trick' that I was aware of, but there is a solid principle. Trees like sunlight and their branches like to grow towards it. Sure enough, when I looked up there was a definite preponderance of branches above the droppings. The birds had little option of where to perch, and hence where to do their business. QED, the bird poo was on the south side of the tree.

The Frost Compass

This picture was taken yesterday morning. The frost line on the top of my Land Rover runs close to a north-south line.

The morning sun has risen in the southeast and warmed the eastern driver's side and southern rear of the car. The warming from the larger driver's side is having a greater effect, which is why the main frost line is north-south.

Otherworldliness

Venus and Jupiter will be hanging low in the southwestern sky shortly after dusk over the coming days. A solitary planet that is not expected is often confused with a bright star, but when two appear together the effect is too foreign for that. Even those unfamiliar with the night sky tend to get a feeling of other-worldliness.

Venus is much the brighter of the two, the brightest of all celestial objects after the sun and moon, and will be the first thing that can be seen in the night sky as the sun sets. Venus is so bright that it is in theory possible to see shadows from it on a clear moonless night, but light pollution in the UK sadly makes that very unlikely here. This screen shot is from some excellent software called 'Stellarium', which can be downloaded from here. It shows the southwestern sky as it will appear shortly after sunset this evening, with the cardinal points and constellations pencilled in to help.

Southern Sun and Christmas Fun

If someone had casually asked me to draw up a list of the people I was most likely to use as sources for my blogging over the coming week there would have been some predictable names. Nowhere in the top ten thousand names would the words 'Nigella' or 'Lawson' have appeared together. Regular blog readers will know how much I enjoy understanding the connection between phenomena such as the earth's orbit around the sun and our daily lives. Christmas is such a time and, almost unbelievably, this is where we hand over to Nigella in her Christmas cookbook,

'Biblical scholars generally tend to believe that Christ's birth probably fell about six months after Passover, which would make it nearer September than December. However, the Roman Festival of Saturnalia - a time of merry-making, excess and misrule, precursor to the office party and much else besides - fell around the middle of December, and led up to the Sol Invictus - or unconquered sun - festival. Around this time mummers would go about carousing and entertaining people in their homes, which is what has led to our carol-singing now. The idea of thte unconquered sun, or the rebirth of the sun, has been linked by Catholics to the notion of the birth of Christ, and links, too, with the pagan notion, the one I cling to most affectionately, of the winter solstice being about the promise of the return of light in the depth of the dark winter.'

Put another way, it didn't really matter what name your god went by or whether they existed at all, the sun's cycle was a very large part of the popular culture of the past couple of thousand years and more. Almost everything we popularly consider 'Christmassy' these days can be linked back to the amount of south in the sun. From giving presents, singing carols, celebrating holy births, snow, merriment... it all has its roots in the fact that the earth is tilted by twenty-three and a half degrees from its plane of orbit around the sun, which means that the sun gives more heat and light at certain times of the year and rises and sets in a different place each day.

Barchans and Yardangs

One of the tricks of desert navigation is remembering that wind direction is never entirely random and over time is actually quite dependable. If we know the direction the wind normally blows from and we have ways of reading that direction from the land then we can get our bearings, even when there is no wind at all.

If you are interested in the relationships between wind, sand and desert then there is a good introduction on this page from the Earth Science Australia website. It includes explanations of the great-sounding parabolic, star and barchan dunes and the even better sounding 'Yardangs'.

Horizon

There was a typically excellent Horizon documentary on BBC2 last night called, 'Do You Know What Time It Is?' It ranged and veered in a challenging and entertaining way from the Mayans to the sub-atomic. I hadn't planned to watch it all, more of a 'give it a chance' type of sit down, but it got its claws in early on. I failed to escape the sofa for the full hour, despite being subjected to some string theory along the way.

One of the things I learned (as opposed to being 'bamboozled by') was that the time it takes the earth to rotate varies slightly (a millisecond or so) each day and the reason for it is... the winds. The winds on earth actually affect the speed the whole thing rotates. And, as Columbo might say, one more thing... the speed of the earth's rotation is slowing down, a few hundred million years ago a day only lasted 22 hours.

Like so many other excellent Horizon programmes this one really got the mental juices flowing, without it has to be said actually changing the price of tea in China very much.

The Lichen Few

A little over a month ago I promised to look at how trees have brown or 'tanned' looking lichen on their north side in this country (even though buildings tend to have brown mosses and lichens on their south side). This silver birch is a good example of how striking that rusty brown colour can be. It has a strong bias towards growing on the north sides of trees in England. The only reason I have for that is a likely preference for moist conditions. Lichens are wonderfully complex organisms. Any plant or animal is likely to have hidden depths and take time to fully comprehend, but lichens take this to a new level. In a conversation with Rob, the local Forestry Commission manager, he was quite candid:

'Yes, I've noticed that growth too, but to be honest if you want to know more you need to talk to lichen people, there are a few that specialise in nothing else and they are the only ones who really understand lichens.'

The reason for their complexity is that they are symbiotic, they are an association of algae and funghi, which take on about 15,000 known forms. In fact the debate still goes on within the scientific community about how they should be classified at all. Sometimes maybe there is more joy to be had in just looking at nature and not trying to get too clever!

In the South Downs nobody can hear you scream...

During a navigation exercise in the South Downs last week, I ducked under an arch formed by a large fallen beech and then got stuck. When I finally managed to extricate myself I found this beast that had locked itself into my rucksack. It was lucky that it was my pack not my back that caught it or there would still be part of me out there.