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

Tristan Gooley is used to flying solo and sailing across the Atlantic or feeling at home with nomadic tribes, but, he tells William Cook, you can have just as many adventures in the British countryside

‘Nothing is random. Everything is connected’ (Micha Theiner)

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.