Vivid Ready

A compass tells you one thing, which is where magnetic north is. Everything useful comes from setting the map to the ground, reading the shape of the land, and knowing where you are before you need to know where you are going.

Almost everyone now navigates by a blue dot on a screen, and the blue dot is excellent right up until the battery dies, the phone gets wet, or the network and the satellites are unavailable. This app exists for that afternoon.

Map and compass is not difficult and it is not intuitive. The single most useful habit, which costs nothing, is knowing where you are continuously rather than working it out when you are already lost.

What a compass actually does

It tells you where magnetic north is. That is all.

Everything else is what you do with that one fact: turning the map the right way round, taking a direction off the map and following it on the ground, and turning a direction on the ground into a line on the map.

The parts that matter on a baseplate compass:

The needle, red end to magnetic north.
The housing, the rotating dial marked in degrees.
The orienting arrow and lines inside the housing, which turn with the dial.
The direction of travel arrow on the baseplate, which does not turn.
The edge of the baseplate, which is your straight edge on the map.

A baseplate compass is worth having over a button compass or a phone. It costs little, it needs no power, and it works wet, cold and gloved.

The three norths

Why there are three, and which you use

North	What it is	Where it appears
True north	The geographic pole	Rarely used in practice
Grid north	The direction the map's grid lines run	On the map
Magnetic north	Where the needle points	On the compass

The angle between grid north and magnetic north is called magnetic variation, and it changes with where you are and drifts over years.

In Great Britain it is currently small, of the order of a degree, which for most practical walking is inside the error of following a bearing anyway. That is a recent situation: variation was several degrees west for most of the last century and has been decreasing.

The consequence for you: the variation figure printed on an older map is now wrong. Do not apply an out-of-date correction, because doing so introduces an error rather than removing one. Check the current value for your area, note it on the map, and if it is around a degree, ignore it for ordinary walking and account for it on a long leg over featureless ground.

Where it does matter is a long bearing. One degree of error puts you about 17 metres off after a kilometre. Five degrees puts you 87 metres off, which on a moor in cloud is the difference between finding a path junction and not.

Orienting the map

The single most useful skill on this page and the one people skip.

Turn the map so that the ground and the map agree. Not so the writing is the right way up.

With a compass: lay the compass on the map, turn the whole map and compass together until the needle lies parallel with the map's north-south grid lines, red end to the top of the map.

Without a compass: turn the map until the features on it line up with the features you can see. A road running away to your left on the ground should run away to your left on the map.

Then keep it that way. Walk with the map oriented, turning it as you turn, even though the writing ends up upside down. Everything becomes easier: left on the ground is left on the map, and the hill in front of you is the contour ring in front of your thumb.

Thumb the map. Keep your thumb on your current position and move it as you go. It sounds trivial and it is the habit that separates people who know where they are from people who are about to find out they do not.

Reading the shape of the land

Contours are the part of a map that takes practice and the part that is worth it, because the shape of the land does not change when a path is rerouted, a wood is felled or a wall falls down.

Contour lines join points of the same height. Close together means steep, far apart means gentle.
Ring contours are a hilltop.
A V pointing uphill is a valley or a stream. A V or a U pointing downhill is a spur or a ridge.
Count the interval, which is usually 5 or 10 metres on British mapping, so you can read height at a glance.

Practise on ground you know. Take the map to a hill you have walked many times and match what you see to what is drawn. Half an hour doing that is worth more than any amount of reading.

Learn a handful of symbols properly: the difference between a public right of way and a track, what a boundary is, where field walls and fences are marked, and what is and is not likely to still be there.

Distinguish what changes from what does not. Contours, rivers, lakes, crags and the coast are reliable. Forestry, field boundaries, buildings, tracks and paths all change, and on an old map many of them will have.

Staying found

DANGER

The moment you are unsure where you are, stop walking.

Uncertainty grows with every step. The area you might be in expands as you move, and the features you could have used to fix your position are now behind you. Ten minutes standing still with the map is worth an hour of walking on hoping it becomes obvious.

If you cannot place yourself, go back to the last point you were certain of. Retracing is not failure; it is the reliable method, and it is what mountain rescue would tell you to do.

Weather, cold and darkness outrank navigation. If it is closing in, shelter and warmth come first and the route can wait. See hypothermia and make one warm room, the principles of which apply outdoors too.

Tell somebody your route and your expected return time before you leave, and tell them when you are back. That single habit is what turns a bad night into a search that starts at the right time and in the right place.

The habits that keep you found:

Thumb the map and update it constantly.
Tick off features as you pass them: a stream crossing, a wall corner, a change of slope.
Use handrails: follow a linear feature such as a wall, a stream, a ridge or a track that runs where you want to go. Far easier than a bearing and much harder to get wrong.
Use catching features: something unmissable beyond your target, so you know you have overshot. A road, a river, a forest edge.
Note the time when you leave a known point, so you can estimate how far you have come.

What deflects a compass

A compass needle responds to any nearby magnetic field, and modern life is full of them.

Keep it away from the phone, and particularly from a phone case with a magnetic closure or a magnetic mount, which will hold a needle several degrees off.
Away from a vehicle, which deflects a compass from a couple of metres.
Away from ironwork: gates, fence posts, railings, and the metal frame of a rucksack.
Away from other compasses, watches with magnets, camera lenses and speakers.
Take a bearing standing clear of everything, holding the compass flat and away from your body.
Some rock is magnetic, notably in parts of the Cuillin on Skye, and a compass genuinely cannot be trusted there. It is rare and it is worth knowing.

Check your compass against a known direction occasionally. A compass can lose polarity if stored against a magnet, and a reversed needle points confidently in exactly the wrong direction.

What to carry

A paper map of your area, at 1:25,000 for walking, kept in a waterproof case or printed on waterproof paper. Paper needs no battery, gets dropped without breaking, and shows you the whole area at once, which a screen never does.
A baseplate compass, and a spare button compass costs almost nothing.
A watch, for timing legs.
A torch, because navigation at night is a different activity and one you may not have chosen.
The phone as well. This is not an argument against digital navigation, which is excellent. It is an argument against having only one method.