Take and walk a bearing

A bearing is the tool for when you cannot see where you are going: cloud, darkness, forest, featureless moor, or snow. On clear ground with visible features you rarely need one, and reaching for a bearing when a wall runs where you want to go is making work for yourself.

Taking one is mechanical. Following one accurately is the part that needs technique, because human beings do not walk in straight lines.

Taking a bearing from the map

Three steps, and the needle is irrelevant for all three.

1. Lay the compass edge along your route, from where you are to where you want to go, with the direction of travel arrow pointing the way you want to go. Getting this backwards gives you a bearing exactly 180 degrees wrong, which is the classic and expensive error.
2. Turn the housing until the orienting lines inside it lie parallel with the north-south grid lines on the map, and the orienting arrow points to the top of the map.
3. Read the number at the index line. That is your bearing.

The needle does nothing here. The map is not oriented, the compass is being used as a protractor, and the needle can point anywhere. People instinctively try to involve it and it produces nonsense.

Adjust for magnetic variation if it is significant. Across Great Britain it is currently around a degree, small enough to ignore on a short leg and worth applying on a long one. Check the current figure rather than the one printed on an old map, which will be out of date. See map and compass basics.

Walking it

1. Hold the compass flat, in front of you, direction of travel arrow pointing away from your chest.
2. Turn your whole body until the red end of the needle sits inside the orienting arrow. Boxing the needle, or putting the dog in the kennel.
3. The direction of travel arrow now points at your destination. Look up along it.

Then put the compass away and use your eyes.

• Pick an object on the line: a distinctive rock, a tree, a fence post, a bush. As far ahead as you can see it clearly.
• Walk to it, not watching the compass at all, choosing the easiest ground.
• At that object, take the bearing again and pick the next one.
• Repeat.

In poor visibility with nothing to aim at, send a companion ahead to the limit of sight, direct them left or right onto the line, then walk to them and repeat. Alone, this is much harder, and the answer is short legs and careful pacing.

Why you drift

Almost everybody veers consistently to one side when walking without a visual reference. It is individual, it is repeatable, and in poor visibility it is what produces the classic circular track.

Know your own drift. Walk a bearing across a field with your eyes shut for fifty paces and see which way you have gone. Whichever way it is, it will be the same way next time, and you can allow for it.

The fix is the object-to-object method above. A visual reference removes the drift entirely, which is why it matters more than compass accuracy.

Pacing and timing

Knowing how far you have gone is half of navigation and the half people neglect.

Pacing:

1. Measure 100 metres on flat ground.
2. Walk it at your normal pace and count double paces, that is, every time your right foot lands.
3. Do it three times and average. Most adults are somewhere around 60 to 70 double paces per 100 metres.
4. Write your number on the compass in permanent marker.

Your figure changes with load, gradient, terrain and tiredness. Uphill, through heather, in deep snow or carrying a pack it will be more. Learn the rough adjustment rather than assuming the flat-ground number.

Timing is the other method, useful over longer distances. A rough working rule for walking is about 4 kilometres an hour on good ground, plus roughly a minute for every 10 metres of ascent. Time your legs and you can estimate distance without counting anything.

Use both. Pacing is accurate over short distances and tedious over long ones. Timing is the reverse.

Aiming off

The technique that makes bearings genuinely reliable, and it feels wrong until you have used it once.

If your target sits on a linear feature, a stream, a wall, a track, a forest edge, do not aim at the target. Aim deliberately to one side of it.

Then when you hit the linear feature you know, with certainty, which way to turn. Aim straight at it and you arrive at the wall not knowing whether the gate is thirty metres left or thirty metres right, and half the time you will choose wrong and walk away from it.

Aim off by enough to be sure, and always to the same side. This converts an unknown error into a known one, which is the whole idea.

Attack points

The other technique that makes long legs work.

Rather than taking one long bearing to a small target, take a bearing to a large obvious feature near it, then navigate the last short distance from there.

A stream junction, a wall corner, a lone building, a spot height. Something you cannot miss. Then from that attack point, a short accurate bearing and a pace count to the actual target.

Long legs accumulate error; short legs do not. Breaking a two kilometre leg into a bearing to an attack point and a 200 metre bearing from it is far more reliable than one straight line, and it is what experienced navigators do routinely.

Taking a bearing from the ground

The reverse operation, used to work out where you are.

1. Point the direction of travel arrow at the feature, holding the compass flat and clear of metal.
2. Turn the housing until the needle sits in the orienting arrow.
3. Read the bearing. That is the direction from you to the feature.
4. On the map, lay the compass edge on the feature, rotate the whole compass around it until the orienting lines are parallel with the north lines, and draw the line. You are somewhere on it.

Two features give you a fix where the lines cross. Three is better, because three lines making a small triangle tells you how good your fix is, and three lines meeting perfectly tells you that you got lucky.

A single bearing plus a linear feature works too: one bearing to a hilltop, crossed with the track you are standing on, places you.

When not to use one

Also do not use a bearing when there is a handrail. If a wall, a stream, a ridge or a track runs where you want to go, follow it. It cannot be misread, it needs no counting, and it works when you are tired.