Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: Two Journeys
Introduction: The Art of Natural Navigation
1. Vale and Dune: The Land
2. The Perfect Illusion: The Sun
3. The Firmament
4. The Fickle Moon
5. The Sea
6. The Elements
7. Creatures of Habit
8. Where Am I?
Unity: An Epilogue
Sources and Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Tristan Gooley set up his natural navigation school, The Natural Navigator, after studying and practising the art for over ten years. His passion for the subject stems from hands-on experience. He has led expeditions in five continents, climbed mountains in Europe, Africa and Asia, sailed across oceans and piloted small aircraft to Africa and the Arctic. He is the only living person to have both flown and sailed solo across the Atlantic. Tristan is a Fellow of both the Royal Institute of Navigation and the Royal Geographical Society and is the Vice Chairman of Trailfinders. He lives with his wife and two sons in West Sussex.
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Is the light vanished from our golden sun,
Or is this daedal-fashioned earth less fair,
That we are nature’s heritors, and one
With every pulse of life that beats the air?
Rather new suns across the sky shall pass,
New splendour come unto the flower, new glory to the grass.
And we two lovers shall not sit afar,
Critics of nature, but the joyous sea
Shall be our raiment, and the bearded star
Shoot arrows at our pleasure! We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all Aeons mix and mingle with the Kosmic Soul!
From Panthea by Oscar Wilde
In the beech wood near where I live I came across a large, dominant tree that had dissuaded all other trees from attempting to grow too close to it. The ground around it was a thick carpet of undergrowth and ivy. On one side of this great beech the light and dark green ground was flecked with white. The branches on one side of the tree had been favoured by the birds and they had chosen to demonstrate this by shaking their tails and flicking their paintbrushes at the ground below it.
It would have been too easy to overlook those white splatterings; I must have done it a hundred times before. But on that occasion my senses were alert enough to catch them. The observation led to thought and after a short pause in the shade of the tree, there followed a simple theory. There were more branches on one side of the beech tree than the other, which was why the birds had favoured it. The tree’s need for sunlight and the sun’s southern arc suggested that the white flecks of guano were a clue to south. The sun, tree and birds had come together to form a ‘bird poo compass’, one that would likely go unnoticed by all who do not take an interest in the strange art that is natural navigation.
In this book it has been necessary to divide the natural world up into its domains. This is the best way to get to know the different faces of natural navigation, but the joy is to be had by experiencing it in everything we encounter in the world around us. We like to compartmentalise, it is one of our many coping strategies for the complex world in which we live, but sometimes there is more fun to be had by letting the divisions crumble.
If we head out on a clear night to look up at the stars, it does no harm to sense the breeze on our faces or to reflect how the clarity of the air itself provides clues as to the relationship between sun, air and water. The stars will not disappear if we pick up the smell of a log fire on the breeze and realise that this is being carried across from the village to the east of us, or if we hear an owl and note that he is in the woods to the south. The time we invest in trying to both fathom and observe the natural world yields a reward – an insight into the interconnectedness of nature.
There is delight to be found in esoteric connections. We can watch the long straggles of wool on sheep to confirm the wind direction, as the sheep themselves follow the shade of great oaks round the tree on a hot summer’s day, like a clock and a compass.
On the shores of Chichester harbour, on the south coast of England, there is a village called Bosham; the type of place that lazy guidebooks refer to as sleepy and pretty. It is reputedly the spot where King Canute, tired by the unquestioning obsequiousness of his subjects, ordered back the tide to demonstrate the very visible limit of his powers. Canute was given a further tragic reminder of our impotence against nature when his young daughter was drowned in the mill stream.
I can remember visiting Bosham with my wife about six years ago. We walked around the village and then looked in on the thousand-year-old church, where Canute’s daughter is believed to have been buried. The village is situated in one of those meeting points of land and water where history was always going to happen, every square inch of the place has probably had its moment. The truth is that I was ignorant of almost all of it on our first visit. We walked from the church to a pub at the water’s edge, bought a couple of drinks and sat, looking out at the scene of coastal perfection. I felt very little. It was undeniably ‘pretty’ and certainly tranquil, if not ‘sleepy’. There was some small movement as a few kayakers waded out into the shallow water. All the ingredients had been assembled for a perfect moment, if such a thing exists, but instead I felt no more moved than if I were looking at the picture on a postcard of Bosham.
A little over a year ago my wife and I returned to Bosham. We followed a similar route – it is a small village and there are not many to choose from. My face was picking up the subtle shifts in the breeze as we moved past a boathouse and then I strained to make sense of a strange curve in the wood of a churchyard yew, but failed.
We stood at the water’s edge with our drinks, a metre or so from where we had sat six years before, and looked out. The scene was the same, and yet it could not have been more different. The sun was dropping to the north of west and it arranged the land and water around us. The trees reflected the years of sun and wind. The first quarter moon pointed south and then ganged up with the strong smells of marine decay to describe the neap tide. The last of the sea breeze was greeting us and telling us that there would be a change soon. My senses fought to take in all the clues and my mind worked excitedly to fit the jigsaw together. I think my wife could sense the cogs whirring. She may have thought that I was worried about something and asked if I was enjoying myself. ‘Yes.’ I replied. And I meant it.
A few minutes later I asked her where she would like to eat. I followed her as she tracked the scent of fish and chips to the pub around the corner.
Put away your map and look up from your GPS. We are all natural navigators.
Starting with a simple question – ‘Which way am I looking?’ – Tristan Gooley blends natural science, myth, folklore and the history of travel to introduce you to the rare and ancient art of finding your way using nature’s own sign-posts, from the feel of a rock to the look of the moon.
With Tristan’s help, you’ll learn why some trees grow the way they do and how they can help you find your way in the countryside. You’ll discover how it’s possible to find North simply by looking at a puddle and how natural signs can be used to navigate on the open ocean and in the heart of the city. Wonderfully detailed and full of fascinating stories, this is a glorious exploration of a rediscovered art.
For Sophie, Benedict and Vincent
THE MOST COMMON method for finding direction on land relies on the traveller’s familiarity with the landscape itself. This is known as landmark navigation. Young men of the Tuareg, a Berber nomadic people who are the principal inhabitants of the Sahara Desert, tend goats from a very early age. They are given clear guidelines as to the range within which they and the goats are allowed to go. This area is then extended steadily in order to mould the herder’s instinct. Over time, they learn to find their way over a large area without any formal training in the art of navigation. A very similar method of learning is experienced by all of us as we come to know our own home area. All of us make countless routine journeys each day, and the methods we apply in navigating our way through known territory can equally apply to journeys made through unknown lands.
An important childhood lesson is that getting lost is not much fun. From ancient wilderness to supermarket aisles, few people have reached adulthood without some memories of disorientation and the accompanying fear. At the heart of this experience is the realisation that straying from family or venturing away from home needs to be accompanied by the ability to get back. This is one of the simplest of navigational philosophies: if you can find your way back safely, knowledge about the direction of the outward journey is a lot less critical and can often be dispensed with.
Learning this forms a fundamental part of human development, and is woven into our culture. Children grow up with tales like that of Hansel and Gretel, the two children who become lost in the wood and are captured and fattened up by a cannibalistic witch. The story delivers a strong moral: getting lost can end in terror. Knowing that there is a need to get back is not enough; it is the ability to find the way back that is crucial. Hansel and Gretel were aware that they needed to be able to find their way home, but failed because the trail of breadcrumbs they left behind them was eaten by the birds.
Age brings with it experience and greater abilities, but the challenge remains. The stories that adults enjoy continue to reflect our fear of being lost. On the island of Crete the Minotaur, a half-bull, half-man monster, lived at the heart of a complex labyrinth. Each year Minos, the king of the island, demanded that the Athenians feed the Minotaur seven boys and seven maidens to avenge the death of his son at their hands. One year the Athenian hero Theseus decided to put an end to this and asked to be delivered to the Minotaur as one of the sacrificial boys. He made his way into the labyrinth and successfully slew the Minotaur. If Theseus had acted alone this may have been the end of him as well as the monster, since this was as far as he had planned. Fortunately, he had had an accomplice. He was able to escape the labyrinth and survive only because the princess Ariadne had shown him how to find his way back out of the maze by following a thread she gave to him.
The woods of childhood become the Cretan labyrinth and the breadcrumbs become the thread, but the moral – and the fear – remain.
If myth and legend help illustrate the perils of getting lost and the importance of navigating the return journey, they are less effective at demonstrating any practical and effective methods of retracing the same route.
A more practical method than leaving thread or breadcrumbs is to in some way alter the landscape itself. Trail blazing is the process of marking a path at various points, creating markers that then assist on the return journey and on subsequent visits. This takes many forms, from leaving chalk markings to broken branches. Signposts are themselves just highly evolved trail blazes.
In most areas of open country it is possible to find evidence that those who have gone before us have subtly changed the appearance of the landscape, from the inuksuit, the mounds of stones left by the Inuit in the Arctic serving to indicate good hunting areas and also a guide to the safest way home, to those left by Scott in the Antarctic. Cairns have been used by the American Indians, the nomads of Mongolia and across the mountain ranges of Europe, America and Asia. In one of the many incidents that lend authenticity to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, the protagonists come across cairns that have been left by survivors fleeing a dying town.
At other times and places a different solution might be used. The Aboriginals of Australia traditionally lit spinifex grass fires that indicated the way from a considerable distance. When you drive along a straight road in Europe, it is possible that it is an old Roman road, built with the help of fires to signal the route. Trail blazes, cairns and fires have been set up to stand out from nature, to become visible against the landscape around them for a good reason. Finding direction by reading the land can be difficult and even dangerous. Today’s travellers are fortunate in that modern instruments have allayed some of that immediate danger, but in many ways modern navigational tools do not make the task of reading the land easier; if anything they have made this much more difficult by conditioning the traveller’s focus away from the land itself.
A compass contains no information about the landscape its owner is moving through. Satellite navigation maps strip out much detail, sometimes leaving only public roads in their reds, yellows and greens against a banal beige. This is only the latest in a long cultural development, from Greek philosopher and geographer Anaximander’s first map of the world, created in 550 BC, that has proved that it is possible to convey information about the location of a place without the need to convey a sense of the place itself. This has been a powerful development, but its very success has led to a strangely limited perspective of the world and the journey itself.
The largest scale Ordnance Survey map becomes featureless in the world of sounds, temperature, textures, colours and smells. This may lead to a belief that these features are irrelevant to a journey. Perhaps we even cease to believe that they exist.
On 17 May 1984 Marvin Creamer sailed into Cape May harbour in New Jersey, having completed a sailing circumnavigation of the world without the assistance of navigational instruments. He would seem an unlikely person to think of in relation to the land, but his understanding of the natural world was shaped early on, when his feet were still dry, and must have helped foster a fascination in the methods he would later use very effectively at sea. Early in his account of the voyage he writes:
Farm life for a growing boy was fun. Chirping frogs told you when it was time to get rid of long underwear, the throbbing call of the Whip-poor-will beckoned you to shed your shoes and feel the freshly turned earth between your toes. The sequent blooms of arbutus, violets, laurel, lady slippers, honeysuckle, and magnolias provided a calendar guide for closing school and getting plants started for the summer’s crops.
Navigating naturally on land is about reintroducing a childlike curiosity to the journey. It is about learning to take note of the things that do not always appear on maps and sensations which are not easily recorded. It is about reconnecting with the land, and in doing so, keeping at bay the feelings of bewilderment and fear that getting lost can bring, on the outward journey and the return one.
There are two key foundation stones to reading the land. One is learning to interpret the effects of sun, wind and water. The other is gaining an appreciation of the importance of scale.
Useful clues can be on a distant horizon or just centimetres away. This means that it is necessary to keep the senses scouring, shifting focus constantly, which requires conscious effort, but yields plenty of rewards. The natural navigator puts more into a land journey than other travellers, but returns with a basketful of observations and sensations that pass others by: the valley that comes to life with the sound of water over rocks being carried by a breeze – all of this has been felt, has been understood.
The effects of sun, wind and water are ubiquitous. Sometimes it is obvious: the outline of the coast, seen from a hilltop. At other times their effects are harder to glean – the infinite number of subtly different shades of bark colour. This is where science and art meet, at once tantalising and frustrating. However hard it might be to decipher the complex information being delivered by our eyes and other senses, it is crucial to remember that within a seemingly random series of events, there will almost certainly be some order, some beautiful if hard to fathom logic to it all. All living things rely on the sun and water, even if indirectly, and if their behaviour does not reflect the need to harness these two elements then their chances of survival are lower. Keeping this in mind and using all the senses can help solve many enigmas. A tree in a town centre growing in a way that appears confusing initially may start to make sense when the sunlight bouncing off the tall mirror-glass building on the other side of the road is felt on one cheek.
The search for distant and closer clues should start from the best position possible. This usually means finding the highest vantage point and then looking all around, as well as up and down. A good view will help to form a picture of the shape, the patterns and grain of the land itself. Studying the land will reveal whether it consists of flat open plains or gentle undulations, or perhaps steeper, more dramatic rises and falls to the Earth’s surface. High ground will tell a story of geological formation and erosion. In the south of England there is a range of hills called the South Downs, mounds of chalk that have determinedly weathered erosion over millions of years. They form a range that runs broadly west to east, near parallel to the south coast. Once this alignment is understood, one can make simple deductions. If the sea can be seen, then there must be some south in the view, but if the land slopes away continuously to low country it must be close to north. To the east and west the ridge continues across rolling summits without losing height. I use this example to demonstrate how it is possible to learn the characteristics and features of a range of hills, to read their text. Some, like the Biligiriranga Hills, in India, follow a very straight line, others are more sinuous and therefore present more of a challenge. It takes time to become familiar with a new range of hills, but they all yield their secrets eventually and when they do it can become possible to walk a long way in a chosen direction with no other aid.
The shape and alignment of hills and valleys can yield directional clues, but the character of the hills themselves can also be influenced by aspect. The southern side of any range of hills in the northern hemisphere will experience a greater variety of temperature than the northern side. In winter, the southern side of a hill may go through repeated frost and thaw cycles, while the northern side, hidden from the warmth of the sun, remains consistently frozen. In mountainous regions like the Alps this difference is drawn by the varying heights of the snowline. This leads to greater erosive forces on the southern side, often giving it a different look and feel.
On a smaller scale, burrowing animals like moles tend to prefer damper, softer, more malleable mud that can be found on the shaded slopes and this can lend a darker, rougher appearance to one side of a grassy hill. Sometimes the general effect is detectable from a distance, but the detail can only be seen close up. In the summer in particular, shaded areas retain moisture longer: a grassy slope that has a darker appearance from a distance may reveal a few small dark circles closer up, giving the whole slope a darker hue. Inspecting these dark patches close up in turn will reveal much smaller culprits, like a writhing army of ants enjoying the ground that has been kept shady, cool and moist.
Hills and rivers have a symbiotic relationship; water is channelled by land but then carves into that land over time. It is impossible to understand one without the other. While the Pennines run north–south, there are rivers in the Pennines, like the Ure and its accompanying valley of Wensleydale, that run west–east off them.
The need to understand the character of the land in a particular area is an ancient one, often reflected in myth and legend. In one part of the Kalahari Desert, a valley and the minerals found there are explained by a myth about a creature called Gamama. Gamama was bitten by a snake, and as it dragged its injured leg, it gouged out the valley. Then the snake bite brought on a fever and Gamama vomited. The vomit dried as the visible minerals.
Water, in its solid form of ice, has shaped large areas of land through the movement of glaciers and ice sheets. Within the broader effects of this ice flow, there are occasionally more distinct patterns that can be read. The shape of the land can betray the direction of the long-departed ice and can in turn be used to find direction. In County Armagh, Northern Ireland, there are a series of small hills known as ‘drumlins’, from the Gaelic word for hills, that have been shaped by the retreating ice and appear elongated along the axis that the ice has flowed, in this case south–north. Where the ice remains it cloaks the land and makes the task harder, but not impossible. In the Antarctic, Shackleton learned to read the shape of the land through the ice sheets and crevasses themselves.
Where there is little water, the geology becomes of greater importance. The desert-dwelling Bedouin of the Arabian Peninsula come to know intimately the shape of rock outcropping and to recognise patterns where others would see none. In the 1960s, the British explorer and writer John Hillaby led a caravan of camels over a thousand kilometres across the North Kenyan desert to Lake Rudolph. At one stage he used a lava wall as his guide, but then left it when it turned east and he wanted to go south.
Once a relationship with the local land and water has been developed, it is time to look at the ground itself. When looking at the land in detail, scale of distance and time are important, since not only the geological forces of millions of years, but also differences that appear over several hours as the result of the elements can be witnessed. In either case the search is for trends and biases. The most obvious and frequently changing of these biases can be seen in the relationship between the sun and moisture levels.
Puddles have much to teach us about the way the land can be read and how deductions about the arc of the sun can be used to find direction. They are easily accessible repositories of information.
Nearly all country tracks and paths have an incline of some sort on each side. Very often there will be some plant growth on either side too, sometimes only short grass, at other times burgeoning undergrowth, bushes or even trees. As the sun moves through the sky each day it casts its shadows on the path and the position of these shadows can cause some parts of the track to dry more slowly than others. A path that heads north–south will receive roughly equal amounts of drying sunlight on each side, since the sun rises on one side of it and sets on the other. The drying is evened out over the course of the average day. However, in the northern hemisphere the sun spends most of its time in the southern part of the sky, which means that on an east–west path, the incline and growth on the southern side of the track will cast a shadow on the southern part of the track itself. Moisture is retained, puddles last longer.
Over time there is often a compounding effect. Walkers or vehicles pass through country lanes and the softer southern side of the track is therefore more easily worn. The next time the rain falls, the southern side gathers more water than the northern side and the cycle begins again. In summer, the puddles may have evaporated away, but their effect can still be read in the shape of the dry mud and often in a shade difference between two sides of a path. The result is that east–west paths can look very different to north–south paths and the junctions between the two will often reveal a stark change.
A detail that is nearly always overlooked is the colour of puddles. Occasionally it is possible to spot a marked difference between each end of one particular puddle, perhaps a translucent muddy water at one end and an opaque pale green at the other. This effect can be caused by plant matter or algae near the surface of the puddle being blown to one end by a prevailing wind. In the UK, the prevailing wind is from the south-west, and will push at the surface of the water of a puddle, so that the north-eastern end will sometimes reveal a shade of green when the south-west does not.
In the early stages of learning to navigate naturally, time spent investigating puddles is rarely wasted. The key is always to think about the surroundings, to understand the sun’s effect, getting to know its different arc in summer and winter, thinking about the shape of the surrounding ground, the wind and rain, and then trying to understand what can be deduced. Jumping to the conclusion that puddles will always be found on the southern side of the track without going through this process will sometimes be wrong. And, equally importantly, the enjoyment of the investigation will have been missed.
The humble puddle tells a story of sun, wind and water that helps point the way. It is a story that is seldom read these days.
In 1771 the English polymath Joseph Priestley let a candle burn in a sealed container until its flame dampened down and finally extinguished. He then placed a small mint plant into the same container. After a few days he noticed that there was again ‘gas’ within the container, of a sufficient quantity to support the candle flame again. He had discovered that plants produce oxygen, as a by-product of photosynthesis, the process whereby plants convert sunlight and water into energy in the form of glucose. This process is made possible through the presence of chlorophyll, found in the chloroplasts, the photoreceptors of green plants. Photosynthesis explains why the presence or absence of sunlight has an enormous impact on the growth of plants, and this knowledge can in turn be used for navigation. More available energy leads to denser growth and is therefore usually found in plants which receive more sunlight. This can be observed in different ways, over vast areas of land or in the branches of a single tree.
Plants, and especially trees, give an area its own unique look and feel. The trees that are prospering will tell us much about the soil, climate and exposure to the elements. Different species tolerate different levels of sun and wind. Seen from above, almost the whole length of Sweden is dominated by spruces and pines. Spruces rule the south and pines hold court in the north. This has led to a booming paper industry and in some regions the sweet and sour stink of a paper factory announces that a town is near.
On a smaller, more immediate scale, the sunnier side of hill slopes will often have denser plant growth than the shaded side. The sunnier slopes will also host the plants that are more energy hungry. One simple trick that can be useful in the northern hemisphere is to remember ‘sweet is south’. The availability of sunlight has a bearing on the amount of energy a plant produces, in the form of glucose or sugar. This means that sweet fruits, like grapes and peaches, tend to favour the slopes that get the most sun, the south-facing ones in the northern hemisphere.
A field of blooming crops that stretches over uneven ground, perhaps over the crest of a hill, will betray direction. The crops in the field will not all prosper or come into bloom simultaneously, and their timing will be influenced not only by the quality of the soil but also by the levels of sunlight and wind. In this way, information can be deduced from a reading of the land. A field of rapeseed may come into brilliant yellow bloom first in the corner that has a southern aspect and some shelter from the wind. This will also be the corner that first reverts to green. These greens and yellows can spread across an undulating field to form a colour compass.
Zooming in further still, the effect of photosynthesis can be seen within individual plants themselves. Plants do not have a central nervous system, which means that their individual parts have to act and react autonomously, so that each leaf, stem and branch can behave independently of the plant as a whole.
There are plants that react surprising quickly to the light. Heliotropic plants – those which track the sun’s motion from east to west across the sky – like the alpine buttercup and others found in high latitudes, rely on getting as much of the low light as they can during daylight hours.
It is not only heliotropic plants which show an urgent and understandable interest in the sun’s direction. Many plants display what is known as leaf heliotropism. The nasturtium leaf, for example, has an organ at its base which enables it to tilt itself at right angles to the sun and track it during the day. Ivy finds itself with conflicting objectives: one part, the stem, tends to grow towards the shade where support from trees is more likely, while its leaves need the sunlight.
As a general rule however, the longer term the effect of the sun the more dependable it will be for navigation. A flower that points to the sun is not adding much to the cause if the sun is clearly visible. A plant that can reveal where the sun has been over time, even at night or on an overcast day, is far more valuable for navigation. The flowers of many plants show a preference for certain aspects, most typically between south and east. The flowers of the Giant Cactus of Tucson, Arizona, for example, show a predilection for the eastern side of the plant, where the sun reaches first and warms the cold air from the previous night. When the nineteenth-century American poet Henry Longfellow wrote, ‘Look at this delicate flower that lifts its head from the meadow, See how its leaves all point to the North as true as the magnet,’ he was likely refering to the prairie weeds and wild lettuces of the United States that do indeed align themselves north–south. The ‘North Pole’ plant of South Africa, Pachypodium namaquanum, is a large succulent with a crowned head that reliably points north.
A more common bias, one that is not so species specific, is often present in the body of a plant and if one side shows a pronounced denser growth, or heaviness, then it is likely that it is receiving more light.
Discerning a pattern of growth on smaller plants may be difficult, but on larger, more established plants, and on trees in particular, the effect can be quite dramatic.
What a great thought of God was that when He thought a tree!
John Ruskin
Within most landscapes, the ideal tree to study is an isolated one, preferably in an area that is exposed to the elements, but not completely ravaged by them. (Take care not to approach an isolated thorn tree at night though, since according to a Norse myth, they are bewitched and a ‘fiery wheel will come forth’ and destroy you.)
The problem with looking at trees in woodland, or even just two or three together, is that these trees will be reacting to each other as well as the elements and so the task of unravelling the evidence of elemental influences becomes much more complex. If forced to choose a tree in a wooded area, always go for the ‘King of the Jungle’: the tree that appears tallest, oldest, most established and dominant. This is the one that is most likely to reflect effects of the elements in an unadulterated way. The trees around it have probably had to make bigger compromises; the price of not getting there first.
Environmental adaptations of the type which can be ‘read’ are usually more pronounced on deciduous trees than on evergreens. Evergreens have evolved to cope with low levels of diffuse light over long periods, whereas deciduous trees explode into action for a few months and their leaves tend to be much broader and these two factors can accentuate their reactions. In many areas, of course, evergreens are dominant and therefore must be used, but they are usually harder to read than an oak, ash or beech which stands proudly alone.
Perspective is vital. The most common mistake that newcomers to the art of natural navigation make is to look up at a tree from one angle, trying to read it before they have taken the time to walk around it. If the only available tree is in the distance, on a ridge on the horizon perhaps, then there may be no choice, but whenever possible a full circuit is advisable. A tree becomes four, eight, sixteen different trees from different perspectives and it is these differences that can reveal information about its orientation.
After studying the tree from as many angles as possible, try to ascertain whether it appears ‘heavier’ on one side. Sometimes this effect is pronounced, but often it is necessary to look for subtle differences. Imagine taking a ‘mental chainsaw’, sawing a tree in half down the middle of its trunk and then weighing each side in a giant set of scales. In northern countries like the UK, the side of the scales that hits the ground will likely have a southerly aspect and the more pronounced the difference, the greater the confidence that can be placed in the scales.