PROFILE
Ditch the satnav. Tear up the map. Throw down the compass. Explorer Tristan Gooley wants us all to find our way in the countryside using nature’s very own secret signs
Tristan Gooley is making eye contact with a tree. It’s showing him the way. Tristan calls himself The Natural Navigator and crosses wood and dale using nature’s signs. No maps, no compasses and – heaven forfend – no GPS allowed. “Everything in nature is trying to tell us something,” he says, as we stroll through his local Sussex woods. Tristan recently discovered that trees have “southern eyes”, an oval ring with a pupillike centre. The mark shows that branches once grew there. Trees grow more branches on their south side because it’s sunnier. As their trunks shoot up, they shed branches that are now in the shade under ones above. They no longer need them.
Trees in the countryside or town are full of clues about our surroundings, says Tristan. Leaves and bark can tell us if water or civilisation is nearby or, as with the “eyes”, which way is south. Lost in a wood? You just need to read what the trees are telling you. Those in the middle tend to have smoother bark, showing that the tree is social and gregarious. It wants to grow with others at the heart of a woodland. Rough bark enables a tree to thrive closer to the edge. Tristan adjusts his fedora: “What I do could be considered quite hippy, but it’s real navigation. It can be just as exciting as an adventure abroad.” And he should know. In his teens, he climbed an active volcano in Indonesia and got lost for three days. In his early thirties, he persuaded a friend to go with him to Mount Toubkal, the highest point in North Africa, without buying any tickets. A couple of years later, he flew and sailed solo over the Atlantic – and is the only living person to have done so. In his latest incarnation, sticking mainly to home territory, Tristan runs natural navigation courses, writes books (his ninth, out this year, is How to Read a Tree) and goes on expeditions with the odd celebrity (he guided Alison Steadman and Steven Mangan through the British countryside for the BBC2 series All Roads Lead Home). In 2020, he was awarded the Harold Spencer Jones Gold Medal, the Royal Institute of Navigation’s highest accolade, recognising his outstanding contribution to navigation.
HOME GROUND
Tristan grew up in the travel world. His father, Sir Mike Gooley, a former SAS officer, set up Trailfinders, now the UK’s largest independently owned travel company, and holidays often meant following him on business to scope out countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines: “I’d been around the world twice by the time I was 20.” But Tristan’s most formative travel experience was on the Isle of Wight, closer to home, where his mother had enrolled her shy
