I turn to Sam Knight of Ramblers Scotland, who runs the Out There Award in Edinburgh, which is aimed at teaching 18- to 26-year-olds the basics of navigation, known as the five Ds (direction, distance, duration, description, destination). He does this, effectively, by encouraging digitally saturated young people to get lost in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh. ‘It’s about choosing the right kind of lost,’ he stresses. ‘If you’re up Ben Nevis and you head the wrong way, the ramifications are massive. But if you learn how to get lost in a relatively safe environment, you realise you can find yourself and then you can apply those techniques when you may really need them.’
At the outset, he always asks participants how they arrived at the park and they always answer that it was by using their phones. ‘When you’re in your phone, you’re missing out on so much,’ he laments. And yet this generational loss of navigational skills is not wholly to do with digital technology. In his book Wayfinding, Michael Bond assembles the evidence that modern children are almost ritually deprived of opportunities to explore their environments and learn these skills for themselves. In 1971, 94 per cent of English primary school children were allowed to walk to places other than their school; by 2010, the proportion had dropped to seven per cent. More than 70 per cent of children aged seven to 11 are supervised wherever they play, indoors or outdoors. He quotes the American psychologist Peter Gray: ‘Nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or “quality time” or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away.’
This might make Knight’s mission seem rather worthy. But he stresses that the main point of learning how to navigate is quite simply that it is fun. He has nothing against Google Maps, he stresses. ‘But people are losing out. They’re following that blue line to the cost of everything else and they’re not part of the process. When you teach people the hard skills of how to navigate using a map and a compass they love it. The joy is making a plan, looking for the clues and relating it back to your map.’
Then again, each new technology brings some less quantifiable loss. The invention of the compass reduced our ability to read the landscape. Moss tends to grow on the north side of trees, for example, and even in cities, it’s a fairly reliable guide to which direction you’re pointing. Even good old-fashioned paper maps have their downsides, says Knight. ‘Back in the day, if you arrived at the Port of Leith and you wanted to get to Balerno, you’d have to follow verbal instructions. It would be a story: follow the river, take a left at this town, look out for the hills, and so on. We’ve sort of lost that.’
It’s missing from the landscape, too. Most ancient place names were based on helpful physical descriptions, designed to make the land legible in an age of oral navigation. The name of the village of Balerno, now on the outskirts of Edinburgh, comes from the Scottish Gaelic Baile Àirneag, meaning something like: sloe tree farm. You’d know you reached it, presumably, because you saw a lot of sloe trees. These meanings are often erased as maps are redrawn and places renamed after the people who colonised them. The Nepali name for Mount Everest is Sagarmatha, meaning something like Goddess of the Sky; the British decided to rename it after George Everest, general surveyor of India, which tells you nothing besides who claimed ownership of it.
Still, there are hopes that technology may, paradoxically, help to reconnect us to nature. Among the new wave of artificially intelligent gizmos heading our way is the Terra, an ‘intelligent compass’ that gently hints at the direction of travel by means of vibrations and nudges. The idea, explains the Switzerland-based designer Stefano Panterotto, is to encourage us to leave our phones at home when we walk. ‘We were talking about the sorts of products that could be made with AI,’ he tells me. ‘Everyone wanted to design the new iPhone. We wanted to go down a different route. We started thinking about a mindfulness device or something to do with meditation. But then we thought getting lost in nature is exactly that. What if we could have something that helps you to get lost in nature and disconnect from your phone and creates an experience around that?’
The Terra, which resembles a rock, works a little like the childhood game where you shout ‘warmer’ and ‘colder’ to the blindfolded player as they grope towards the target. You might ask it to take you to the most beautiful church in Cologne via an ice cream shop – and it will vibrate to reassure you you’re on the right track. ‘It’s a sentient rock. It occasionally wakes up when it’s needed. But mostly it’s just an inanimate object,’ says Panterotto.