‘The natural world is full of signposts’: The adventurer Tristan Gooley on navigating wild Britain

Tristan Gooley has led expeditions on five continents. He’s the only living person to have both flown solo and sailed single-handed across the Atlantic. He’s lived with nomadic tribes in some of the world’s wildest places. So what’s he doing guiding me round his local woods, in this tame corner of the Home Counties? Because, as he’s discovered, you can have just as many adventures in Britain as you can in Borneo, even here in the Sussex commuter belt, where he lives with his wife and their two teenage sons.

Gooley is a natural navigator, someone who can find their way without manmade instruments, simply by following the sun and stars, the contours of the land and water. He’s rediscovered old skills our ancestors used to have, skills indigenous people still use today – a way of life, a way of seeing, that most of us have long forsaken. It’s 10 years since he published his first book, The Natural Navigator, and now his pioneering work has won him the Royal Institute of Navigation’s Gold Medal. His research straddles numerous genres, from astronomy to zoology, but by investigating the links between these genres he’s helped to develop a hybrid discipline, a way of looking at the world which draws on what Germans call the Umwelt.

Like a lot of useful German words, there’s really no adequate translation for Umwelt, but I guess you could say it’s about how the world around us fits together. “Nothing is random,” says Gooley. “Everything is connected.” The natural world is full of signposts and once you start to spot these signposts, how flora and fauna and wind and rain affect each other, any stretch of land, however humdrum, becomes an enticing, exciting place.

“Look at the shape of trees,” he tells me, as we set off into the woods. “Of all the billions of trees on planet Earth there is not one symmetrical one, but if you ask anyone to draw a tree, they’ll draw a symmetrical one.” As he says, his work is about finding patterns in the things that are right under our noses. The asymmetry of every tree is a perfect case in point.

“Every asymmetry is trying to tell us something,” he says, as we wander deeper into the forest. “If somebody says to you, ‘You should connect with nature – it’s good for mental health and wellbeing,’ you’ll find that not many people argue with that, but very few people can actually do anything with that suggestion. But if you say to them, ‘Use a tree to make a compass,’ you’re using your brain to do something which it is better geared to doing, which is solving a puzzle.” So how do you use a tree to make a compass? Well, asymmetry has a lot to do with it. One side may well lean east, away from the prevailing winds, or south, towards warmer climes. Branch shape is another clue. Branches grow towards the light, so branches on the sunnier south side tend to be more horizontal, while branches on the shady northern side are usually more vertical, since light on that side is more scarce. Easy when you know how. “There’s meaning in everything,” he says.

Leaves tell you a good deal too. “If they’re not getting enough light they grow bigger and darker, and if they’re getting lots of sunlight they’re smaller and lighter,” he explains, as he stops to show me a few examples. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece doesn’t tell you much, but together they add up to a complex picture.

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“This is silverweed – it’s a sign that people have been here before us,” he says, drawing my attention to a cluster of tiny plants beneath my feet. “If there’s very little footfall, you get a lot of species. If there’s very heavy footfall, all the plants give up.” However, silverweed, he tells me, is a plant that thrives where others fail, so it’s a valuable signal. If we were somewhere really wild, trying to find a path between two villages, this plant would show us we weren’t far from human settlement. “It’s part of your map.”

But in our brave new world of sat-nav and GPS, why bother? If you’re lost, why not simply look up where you are on your smartphone? For the same reason, we’re walking through these woods, rather than driving through them in Gooley’s Landrover. “The techniques work, and it can be learnt as a practical skill, but it is just as much a cultural activity,” says Gooley. “Navigation is a fundamental part of being human.” Outsourcing it to a computer is like eating fast food instead of cooking. OK, there are times when it’s more convenient, but you lose something along the way.

The reason that Gooley’s approach is so appealing is the same reason that crosswords and murder mysteries are appealing. Humans love solving puzzles, and to solve any puzzle you have to look for clues. “Everything, literally everything, is a clue,” he says. Some of these clues are subtle, but most of them are pretty obvious – once he points them out. Once you begin to see the world his way, you begin to make your own connections, and you end up with a deeper sense of the balance between plants and animals, between climate and terrain. Maybe you already knew that swallows fly low before it rains because of low air pressure, but did you know badgers and bluebells often go together – not because badgers like bluebells, but because they both like chalky soil? Badgers are hard to spot and it’s the wrong season for bluebells, but yew trees also like chalk, so when I see a yew I think of badgers and bluebells, and bees. “Where there are bells, there are bees,” says Gooley. “If you see any bell-shaped flower, there will be bees.”

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And once you know this soil is chalk, you can work out all sorts of other things too. “Rocks, in turn, are telling you about how water and soil will behave,” says Gooley. “We will not see a substantial body of water – no pond, lake, or anything like that – over the next hour’s walking, and that is directly related to the chalk, which is directly related to the trees.” For Gooley this is second nature, but for me it’s new and thrilling. For the first time I’m actually interpreting a forest, rather than merely walking through it.

Gooley notices a clump of stinging nettles. Big deal, I think, but it turns out these nettles are another clue. “There’s a nutrient spike here,” he says. “There’s high levels of phosphate and nitrates in that one spot, which is almost certainly because humans or animals, or most likely both, have peed near here over the years. Nutrients, water, rocks, soil – all of these things are affecting the plants and trees, which in turn are influencing the insects, which in turn are influencing the bigger animals.” In the classroom, I used to switch off when teachers tried to explain this kind of thing. Out here, with Gooley, I finally begin to understand how it all slots into place.

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It’s not just about looking more intently. It’s about listening intently, too. “That sound you can hear, I sometimes call ‘the Fizz’ – it’s the sound of the edge of the woods,” he says. “Wind meeting leaves.” I’d never heard it before, but now I can hear it clearly. I know I’ll always hear it from now on.

His books are full of fascinating information. For instance, did you know that birds of different species club together to warn each other about approaching predators (Gooley calls it a neighbourhood watch scheme)? However, Gooley’s writing style is actually more poetic than scientific. “I let the shadow complete its journey,” he writes in his latest book Wild Signs and Star Paths, describing a recent walk on his beloved South Downs. “The sun clung to the treetops on the hills to the west for seconds before letting go.” No wonder he cites poets, artists and philosophers as often as scientists in his work.

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He was born in 1973 and raised in the M4 corridor. His father, Mike Gooley, had been an officer in the SAS before founding Trailfinders in 1970. “I was able to strip and clean a Browning nine millimetre pistol blindfolded by the age of 14.” His mother bought him sailing lessons. His father bought him flying lessons. He’s done a fair bit of work for his dad’s trailblazing travel firm, but although his father’s twin careers have clearly helped to shape him (the wanderlust, the derring-do), as a traveller he’s always been very much his own man. “When I was 14, 15, 16, summer holidays were putting on a pack with mates and going out into the hills,” he remembers. “All of it was learning at a speed that was a little bit risky – it was all so poorly planned.” He learnt from his mistakes and began to make his way off the beaten track. “I was less constrained by paths.” His meaning is both literal and metaphorical. “I was very, very restless – I was a rebel from day one.”

He went to Eton but he wasn’t a model student. “I found any type of formal education almost unbearable.” Nevertheless, he got his A-levels and went to Newcastle University to read history and politics. However his rebellious side endured. “I really don’t like structured, formal group learning – or structured, formal group anything, to be honest – I’m almost allergic to it.”

In 1993, when he was 19, he hiked up an active volcano in Indonesia, with a similarly young and callow friend. “There were fatalities on the mountain shortly before and shortly after we went there,” he says. “It was the folly of youth.” They took no map, no compass, no cold weather clothing, no first aid kit and no radio. The volcano was 3,700 metres high. His friend started showing symptoms of hypothermia. They got lost, and ran out of food and water. “I nearly killed us both,” he confessed, with commendable candour, in his bestselling book The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs. This mishap taught him a crucial lesson, but it could have cost him his life. “You need to learn the rules before you break them.”

Since then, he’s always set out well prepared, avoiding unnecessary risks and conserving energy. His subsequent adventures have taken him all around the world – into jungles and across deserts and oceans. He sailed in a traditional Arab dhow, guided only by the heavens, and from Scotland to the Arctic, to research Viking methods of navigation. Although his field research is practical, he also relishes the journey. As he writes in How to Read Water, “There is something about being alone on a boat out on the ocean at night that perfectly blends delight and fear.”

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He met his wife, Sophie, at a school disco when they were just 17. “It’s a little bit cheesy, but it was a little bit love-at-first-sight,” he says, bashfully (actually, it sounds a lot like love at first sight, and not cheesy in the slightest). “I’ve met quite a few people over the years who’ve fallen in love hard and deep very young, and the irony is that it brings a level of certainty very early on, and then uncertainty about how to time things.” They got married in 2000 when they were 30. His wife is a pediatrist. Their sons are 16 and 13.

2007 was a watershed. That was the year he flew solo and sailed single-handed across the Atlantic. He was 33. “The solo flight was very dangerous,” he says. “I was technically qualified, but I was not an experienced pilot.” Before he set off, he went to see “seven or eight” people who’d done similar flights before, to seek advice. “By the time I took off, three of the people I went to see had died in light aircraft crashes.” The single-handed voyage was tough in a different way – alone at sea for 26 days. “It’s very psychologically challenging.” You can say that again.

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Since then his focus has been natural (rather than conventional) navigation and his canvas has become more compact. In 2008 he started leading natural navigation courses, taking enthusiasts on treks rather like the one I’m on today, teaching them about what he calls the “lost sixth sense” – the ability our forefathers had to read the landscape and the weather, to find the food they needed for survival and find their way back home. These courses proved so popular that in 2010 they inspired The Natural Navigator, his first book.

Although he still makes journeys to remote places to test and develop his ideas, he gets just as big a thrill guiding clueless amateurs like me around our local woods and meadows, opening our eyes to things we’ve never noticed, even though we’ve seen them countless times before. How often have you walked around your neighbourhood park, and barely bothered to look around you? Once you’ve spent some time with Gooley, or read his books, even the most mundane places suddenly become full of life.

When we were hunter-gatherers, this stuff was second nature. Farming dulled our senses, and industrialisation dulled them a whole lot more. Yet even our Victorian forebears knew far more about the natural world than we do. Spend a few hours with Gooley, and you start to feel something stirring. This was the way we used to live, before civilisation emasculated us. Yes, it was a harder life, but a healthier one – and maybe more fulfilling.

Of course, it’s hardly feasible for us to all live off the land, but there are still many things we can learn from Gooley and apply to our own daily lives. Even in my suburban back garden, I now see all sorts of things I’ve never seen before, thanks to Gooley’s insights, and his enthusiasm for the natural world. It’s all small stuff but it all adds up to a far richer picture of our world – a world that, even in our biggest cities, is still full of nature. Living in a wooded island and not knowing about the trees that grow there and the animals that live off them is like living in a house full of books you’ve never read. Thanks to Gooley, I’m now opening those books and I’m finding, to my surprise, that they’re all about the world I live in.

There’s an old saying that, at heart, we’re all either sailors or farmer. Farmers prefer to stay put. Sailors love to roam. A lot of us feel like sailors, but we end up as farmers – stuck in one place, doing one thing, rather than roaming far and wide. After the walk we’ve been on today, I realise you can still live your life like a sailor, even if you’re a farmer. It’s a way of being, a state of mind. “You never stop learning,” he says.

Gooley drops me off at the station and I catch a train back into London. In a few hours I’m home again, but things don’t look quite the same. As I walk down the high street I realise how many trees there are. As I turn the corner into my leafy cul-de-sac, I recognise several different types of birdsong. I walk up the drive to my suburban home with a fresh sense of anticipation. I walk through the house and open the doors onto the patio. I step out into my back garden, and into another world.