The Natural Navigator

Migrating to a new blog...

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 05:54:00 +0000

I am in the process of redesigning the website, so… much in the way that the Irish monks of the sixth century making their way to Iceland probably had to wait occasionally for the sight of the migrating geese overhead… please bear with me.

The new blog can be found here.

By Jove!

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 06:06:00 +0000

I woke early this morning to a great twilight view of Jupiter, or 'Jove' as the Romans liked to call it, over the eastern horizon. It was a welcome coincidence because I had been studying Antarctic exploration late last night and it featured on a couple of occasions.

The wonderfully named Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote the following in his strongly titled account, 'The Worst Journey in the World',

"Generally we steered by Jupiter, and I never see him now without recalling his friendship in those days!"

On January 27 1912 Robert Falcon Scott, wrote,

"A long way to go, and, by Jove, this is tremendous labour." Poor soul survived for another two months after that before finally succumbing on the 29th March. His frozen fingers managed this final entry in his journal, 'For God's sake look after our People.'

'By Jove!' That, in two words, does a good job of encapsulating the spirit of the age and those that chose to risk their lives in such a way. I will endeavour (another good exploration word) to use it regularly for a few days as a tribute. There is a short explanation of its origin as an exclamation here.

Libyan Desert Photos

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:32:00 +0000

I've spent the morning sorting photos from my trip to the Libyan Sahara. Here are a few to help us look forward to that Indian summer that must be just around the corner...

Sand and camels, sand and tent, sand in eyes and sand in tea. The full desert experience.

The Future is Bright...

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:33:00 +0000

Man follows sat nav to cliff edge...

... The future is wet. Full story can be found here.

Dartington College of Arts

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:09:00 +0000

An enjoyable afternoon spent teaching a group of second year theatre students at Dartington College of Arts near Totnes. Totnes is unlike any other town I know of in Britain. It has a deep affinity for the alternative and so was a welcoming part of the world for someone like me, practising an art that most consider, if they consider it all, not very relevant and definitely not mainstream.

Misha Myers, who had kindly invited me down to teach, explained that the college is going through something of a transitory period. It is a wonderful place and I do hope it has a bright future. The students that I met seem to have the energy to help with that, although I'm not sure if that was drawn from the inspirational surroundings or their apparently bottomless supply of Red Bull.

We spent most of the time walking outside, looking for the usual suspects of sun, shadows, tree shape, moss and lichen growth, tree trunks, mud colour...

Our three hours together finished in my favourite way. I was able to tell a group who had no previous navigation experience that they were now amongst the top 1% of natural navigators in the UK.

Equinox Shadow Lines

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 12:24:00 +0000

As we move on away from the equinox I thought I would post this photo of the lines made by the shadow tip from a stick (or in this case a kids swingball!).

These two lines are from the shadows approaching noon and only one day apart. Since it is the equinox, they are near exact east/west lines. The gap between the chalk lines is at its greatest at the equinox and closes to near zero at the solstices.

On a slight tangent, it was a very similar method, ie. measuring the length of the shadows that helped the ancient Greeks come up with their first estimates of the size of the earth.

SatNav Peaks?

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 09:40:00 +0000

During a mild tidying effort this morning I came close to throwing out the Jan/Feb issue of Navigation News, but then spotted something that I had originally overlooked. A news item that hinted that the role of GPS in our lives may be waning:

'Investment bank Goldman Sachs has voiced the concern that 2009 could usher in several years of decline in the portable navigation device market. It made the comment while moving stocks in Garmin, one of the leading satnav manufacturers, to its 'conviction sell' list.'

I was mistaken. Unfortunately the reason it gave was not that everyone was switching to 'NatNav', but that smartphones were increasingly being fitted with navigation functions. Perhaps as this trend kicks in we can look forward to the sight of fat lorries wedged in narrow country lanes and people wedged inbetween trees too!

Equinoctial Sunrise

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:49:00 +0000

It is the morning after the equinox and not a bad one either. The sun rises due east on the equinox, but the daily difference is at its greatest at this time too so we have already moved north of east.

In this picture the horizon is well above sea level because of the hill, so we have to bear in mind that the angle the sun makes to the horizon will be 90 degrees minus our latitude, ie. our colatitude.

The Great Shadow Stick Riddle

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:04:00 +0000

Although I occasionally get labelled as Mr. Anti-anything-modern-and-would-rather-eat-a-pair-of-hemp-pants-than-use-a-GPS*, the truth is different. I do use a GPS, quite regularly in fact and always take one on serious walks, even if I don't use it. I was able to use it to test natural navigation skills in the Libyan Sahara recently.

Soon I am hoping to use technology to solve a riddle that is proving elusive to both natural observation and thought. That is the shape of the a shadow stick's arc as it goes from one side of an equinox to another. It is too subtle for me to gauge from stick and chalk efforts in my back garden. The answer is not in any of the many books and articles that I have on astronomy, ancient or modern. I have put this little riddle to dozens of good minds over recent months, some of them professional scientists, and no-one has been able to think their way to the answer so far.

The weirdest thing is that I know what the sun does during this elusive period, nothing very dramatic in short, so in theory this should be very straightforward. But it's not quite. How can the shadow go from a curve one way to a curve the other without a straight line involved? Or is there a straight line, and if so when? Because it is definitely not at the equinox, that has to be a very gentle curve in the same direction as the summer one.

Why does it matter? Well in some senses it doesn't, it is unlikely to change the fundamental ways of using the sun to find our way, but it would be, well... nice. I have spent hundreds of hours studying the sun and shadows, both physically and academically and it would give a feeling of completeness if I could just find this small missing piece of the jigsaw.

I think it may be possible to solve using a spreadsheet - horror of horrors! - but I would rather understand the world around me and resort to technology on occasion, than pretend the ignorance is somehow uplifting. It isn't. It's an intellectual irritant. I'd be absolutely delighted if someone reading this sent me the answer though. That would be a natural solution for me to a natural riddle, they need not tell me that they used some piece of whirring technology to work it out.

* On an almost related note, I do know someone who runs a small company that sells bamboo clothing.

Ancient and Modern Crocodiles

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:14:00 +0000

A lateral mind is needed in this business. It can be great fun, searching for connections between things that would never before have seem related. I have been studying ancient geography this morning, as ever on the hunt for clues to methods used by our ancestors.

Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian, refers to a crocodile that allows a bird to pick meat from its teeth. Could this be the inspiration behind the popular, and well-thumbed-in-our-household, children's book, The Selfish Crocodile, by Faustin Charles?

I don't want to spoil the tale for anyone who has yet to read it, but suffice to say that a small creature does some good crocodile dental work.

Heavy Feelings

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:32:00 +0000

News that the European Space Agency's latest venture to study gravity was successfully underway reached me as I was reading about a related topic today.

According to the book, Beyond the Moon by James Greig McCully, the extra mass and consequently gravitational force at the equator caused by the earth's spin is near perfectly counteracted in weight terms by the extra centrifugal effect of spinning faster there than at higher latitudes. Nearly perfectly, but not quite.

What does this mean? Well the counteracting effects leave a net result of a person feeling ever so slightly less heavy at the equator than at the poles, less than one fifth of one percent so not a great deal. Still, slightly odd to think that we become heavier by walking north in the northern hemisphere and vice versa. Worth bearing in mind if you're a boxer or fatfighter at a crucial weigh-in, perhaps.

Bedtime Stars

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:42:00 +0000

If the plan survives contact with the enemy, then our younger son goes to bed at the same time, 7pm, every night. Part of his bedtime routine, after bath, milk and a story is for him to run up to one of us and demand to see the Moon. Unfortunately we are not able to oblige with a view of the Moon every evening, much in the same way that we cannot find enough cake in the universe to satisfy his desires. Our alternative tactic to cake is usually a sweet fruit snack, cheese, raisins etc. The alternative for the Moon, on a clear night will be a bright star.

Sirius is very visible on clear nights at this time to the south. Unfortunately last night it was obscured by a tree branch. Nature is obliging enough to make the stars rise 4 minutes earlier each evening and so this evening, in the absence of the moon our son did at least get a good view of the brightest star in the sky.

Beginner's Guide to Natural Navigation Course Feedback Award

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 19:28:00 +0000

And the award goes to...

"Thank you for a wonderful day, yesterday. The course and surroundings were inspiring. This morning I went for a walk from the house, heading inland and then onto the cliffs along a frequent route. Today was like a new experience with each plant / view being analysed. The walk did take twice as long as usual which my wife does not thank you for."

David Jones, Gower, Wales. 13/03/09.

Sun, Sails and Sand

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:41:00 +0000

The Gooleys were out on the water this morning on our Contessa 32, Golden Eye. It was one of those spring days that exceeded expectations. It felt like a summer holiday as we moored back up at Chichester Marina and walked to the Spinnaker Cafe for lunch. The beach feeling was completed when my younger son picked up a fistful of sand from the cafe sandpit and, before I could intervene, sprinkled it all over a plate of scampi.

The photo is of a fellow Contessa 32 anchored off the beach at East Head, enjoying the rays.

Pendulums and Pigeonholes

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 20:06:00 +0000

One of the things that I love about running my courses is that I'm guaranteed to learn something too, but because of the diverse backgrounds of those that attend I can never guess what area it will be in. Over the past few courses I have learnt something about drumlins, Foucault's pendulum, moles and sewage smells. This is a subject that is wonderfully difficult to pigeonhole, which reminds me...

The Geographical magazine asked me today whether I considered myself a geographer.

I gave the following, slightly long-winded answer:

'Am I a geographer? Good question, but no short answer I'm afraid. My niche has a lot of geography in it, but is probably not part of what the academic geographical world would consider its domain. Natural navigation sits astride many fields including geography, meteorology, natural science and astronomy, to name a few.

However, my recent trip to Libya had a stronger geographical bias than some of my work, focusing as it did on one part of the Sahara. There was some physical geography, mainly sand dune shape relative to wind, but some anecdotal human geography also, from informal interviews with the Tuareg. As part of my preparation for the trip I bought and studied a very old back issue of the Geographical Journal (Vol 35, No. 4 Vol 10 from 1910).'

Changing tack again...

I have had a conversation with Rita Gardner, Director of the RGS, in the past about what geography itself actually is. Her answer, if I recall correctly, centered around understanding change, but she had some sympathy for those that struggled to pin it down.

Perhaps interesting subjects evade pigeonholing, or maybe there are just people (polymaths/rebels/misfits?) that find such subjects alluring. Those annoying people that cannot keep their blog entries on one subject for example.

A Question I Get Asked

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 14:28:00 +0000

I've just updated my website with the answer to a question I get asked a lot, so thought I'd include it here too:

What sort of person comes on your courses?

All sorts! Those who enjoy fresh air and have an open mind. So far there have been artists, soldiers, writers, Navy officers, drainage engineers, lawyers, accountants, police officers, marketing people, IT people, farmers, pilots, actors, sailors, builders, midwives... No astronauts yet, but it's still early days.

Struggling to Keep Up

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 12:30:00 +0000

I find myself drawn into discussions about technology on more days than not. On the navigation front it is all quite comfortable, but when it comes to the social networking thing it's another matter, Web 2.0 it might be called, I really don't know.

I do Twitter occasionally, because I've been told to by my web design company, but I'll confess that the concept still slightly escapes me. Last week a friend that I had not seen since university got in touch to tell me what another mutual friend who he had not seen for ten years, but I had met recently, was doing from his Linked-In page. He seemed to know him better than I do. Before I start to sound too much like an incontinent old dribbler I should get to the point and mention that I've just done an interview for the lovely crowd at www.ooh.com, who seem to be very much in their comfort zone at the forefront of all this stuff. They've got a neat idea. Worth checking out.

Satellite Dish Navigation

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 10:52:00 +0000

A lot of people are aware that TV satellite dishes can be used to find direction. There is a popular belief that in the UK that the dishes point south, which fairly accurate, it is actually normally south-southeast. The areas of Libya that I have just returned from are a few degrees north of the Tropic of Cancer and so some south in the dishes made sense, although I did note that there they tended towards south-southwest.

Libyan Sahara

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:04:00 +0000

Just back after a fantastic and physically intense fortnight in the Libyan desert. This photo of me scaling a dune was taken after nine hours trekking. Every little helps at this stage of the day and so you'll notice that I'm walking on the firmer windward side of the ridge.

It was a great test of skills and opportunity to research. I learned plenty during my time with the Tuareg and, outrageous to claim so I whisper it quietly, I may even have taught them one or two things. I return with over 1000 photos, a packed notebook, some video, some sound recordings and tired legs after averaging over 15 miles a day on foot. A real natural navigation treasure trove, that I will be sharing over the coming months, but now it is time to face the email inbox etc.

Unknown Unknowns in the Desert

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:13:00 +0000

There are many things that I am excited about discovering in the Sahara and some of these are what Donald Rumsfeld might have called the 'known unknowns'. Another thirty degrees of night sky will be offered up, including such important treats as Canopus, the second brightest star in the sky (after Sirius). It is impossible to see under any conditions from Britain.

Although I must not waste the precious liquid, it is also mouth-watering to try to imagine some of the 'unknown unknowns'. I will be keeping the senses fully alert and hoping to catch the smell of oases on the wind, but perhaps there will be some surprises too. R. A. Bagnold, a desert expert and scientific pioneer, once found a water hole by following the smell of a single camel he picked up from eight miles away. My method of travel makes it very unlikely that I will be able to use this method. I suspect that shortly after setting off I will begin the process of smelling more like a camel than a human being myself.

Changing Winds

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:09:00 +0000

During a short outdoor navigation course yesterday, nature once again enjoyed mocking me a little.

While discussing methods of using the wind to navigate, I had explained how wind direction is surprisingly constant over a period of hours and although small shifts are common, large changes are much less so, and complete reversals very rare. The key is understanding that a significant change in wind direction will be caused by a change in the relationship between your location and a nearby weather system, ie. a front moving through. The change in weather is usually gradual enough to foretell of wind shifts, but not always...

Yesterday we witnessed a complete flip, the wind direction shifted almost 180 degrees from south-southwest to north in one hour. This was something that I had just proclaimed to be almost unheard of, unless there was a complete change in weather. The weather had not yet changed, there remained scattered cumulus clouds, which made me uneasy. I came close to volunteering to eat my hat if we did not witness a quite serious weather change shortly, but resisted and just said that it was very likely.

Fortunately, minutes later the sun disappeared, the scattered cumulus clouds merged into a darkening blanket and the rain began to pour. Even cold rainwater trickling down the back of my neck was a better sensation than feeling that nature has a malevolent disregard for any honest attempt to explain it.

Green Tinged Trees

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:49:00 +0000

Picking up on a theme I touched on a few days ago, it is remarkable and delightful how differently we all see the world. Yesterday during a short course in the South Downs, we were sitting on a bench with a great view having a drink of water and a snack. It is a bench and view that I have come to know very well, at least I thought I had.

Scale is such a key to reading the land, the ability and conscious decision to zoom in and out, from miles of landscape one minute to the tiniest patch of lichen the next. Maggie who was sat only two feet from me, spotted something in front of us that I had never noticed before. Her eyes were clearly picking up colours more sensitively than mine yesterday as she had picked out some shades of purple in a distant woodland earlier. She drew my attention to the green tinge in the beech trees that dominate this photo. We are looking south, where the land disappears is the sea, and the moist conditions of the north side of these trees must be proving heaven for mosses and lichens.

Sand Dunes and Endurance

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:05:00 +0000

I spent this evening studying some well-respected sand dune theory before my upcoming trip to the Libyan Sahara. It had been a long day, with lots of fresh air, and I may have bitten off more than I could chew. Let me share a small excerpt of it with you:

'Confining ourselves to fully developed turbulent flow throughout the fluid, there remains the question of the small-scale flow over and round the individual grains on the surface. This depends on Reynolds' Number of the form V*d/v, where d is the mean surface roughness which is of the order of the grain diameter. It has been found that when V*d/v>3.5 the grain behaves as an isolated obstacle in the path of the fluid, and throws off a chain of eddies from its lee face.'

From 'The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes' by R.A. Bagnold. 1954.

Great stuff, I'm sure, but enough to make anyone head into the wilderness.

Natural Navigation Frustration

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:14:00 +0000

On a family visit to Longleat on Monday there was the perfect illustration of a frustrating problem that has confronted me for over a decade.

Sometimes knowing the direction you want to go is not nearly enough.

Direction is the cornerstone of all navigation, not least natural. Natural navigators are sometimes forced towards a principle of 'if we head towards our destination we will get there, eventually'.The problem lies in that sometimes even if we know the way we want to head it is not possible to go that way and we are forced to make difficult choices and compromises.

The Longleat maze is an extreme analogy of the challenge. Standing on one of the wooden bridges that give a limited overview of the maze structure it was quite easy to see the direction of our goal. The wooden fort in the centre of the maze was southwest of us, but this knowledge is next to useless if you come across a junction that offers routes without any southwest in them, as we of course did repeatedly. At that point you have to resort to instinct / guesswork / sixth sense / reading the mind of the enemy! That is point and the fun in a maze, but...

...sometimes the real world is not much kinder. A pure natural navigation exercise across the rural English landscape to a point only five miles away 'as the crow flies' can take five hours or more, if trespass is avoided. It is rare that a path junction gives you an option in exactly the direction you want to go, and so often when it does it will mock you by deviating wildly a few minutes later. This is the main reason that wilderness, even light shades of it, are so valuable for such pure exercises. Dartmoor poses its own challenges with its low level vegetation and even lower visibility at times, but it is a real treat in allowing a walker to pursue a line of their choice - until they are sucked into a bog at least!

Reading the land can help at times, particularly in hilly or mountainous terrain. The classic example is that it is usually better to follow a six mile curvaceous detour around a horseshoe ridge than to charge down into the steep valley and up the other side for the three mile short cut.

At one level this time issue does not matter very much. If time is really the issue then don't walk, or get out a brace of compasses and GPSs. The heart of the frustration for me is not the time it takes to make the journey, but the time it takes to teach the skill. The best method of teaching is often to say 'off you go', but sadly the pressures of modern life are such that there are few who can afford to take a whole day over a few miles. Sometimes it feels as though there is little room for a slow skill in an instant gratification society. Fortunately for me there are still enough who have not signed up to that philosophy yet, who have not yielded all to convenience and who choose to learn this rare art instead.

The Patience of Stonehenge

info@naturalnavigator.com (The Natural Navigator) — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 18:10:00 +0000

The Gooley family spent Sunday afternoon mucking about at Stonehenge and then heating baked beans and pasta on the VW campervan stove. A modern, but not very, ceremony that paid homage to some ancient rituals.

I was perhaps the only tourist walking around the perimeter who was taking note of the varying moss and lichen growth as I worked my way round the stones from the north side through west, south, east and back. It wasn't the subtle shifts in colour that held my thoughts though.

There is surprisingly little that is properly understood about Stonehenge, but some solid deductions are possible. The alignment of the stones confirms a true understanding of solstices by its architects. It is tempting to think that solstices were a widely understood phenomenon even in ancient times and not give this aspect much more thought, but that would be to do a disservice to the Stonehenge people. While it is very easy to understand the principle of the sun's rising and setting moving from a northern to southern extreme from midsummer to midwinter, it is a different matter being able to pinpoint the spot the sun will rise and set on the solstice days from an exact location. The modern observer still uses either sophisticated technology or tables to do this. It did not require any great leap in thought or development of technical ability to do this in ancient times, but it did require considerable patience and dedication.

The erecting of the stones themselves would have taken physical determination (about thirty million hours of it apparently) and some skill, but the correct positioning of them would almost certainly have required observation from a single site over a period of at least a few years. The number of times that the position of rising or setting was obscured by cloud for example cannot be known, but each occasion could potentially have added a year to the project. Given the scale and physical effort behind the endeavour it is unlikely that they would have settled for any approximations.

It is the impressive physical stature of the stones that draws attention, but I find the idea that an ancient society was able to make a big plan and stick to it over many years more fascinating personally, especially since there was no tangible reward for this patience.