Bill's Walks

Walking Round in Circles

Many years ago whilst walking on the moors to the north of Blanchland we found ourselves in a very dense fog. The major objective of the walk was to visit the black headed gull colony on Cow Byers Fell. This was duly done and we got very close to the nests before being bombarded by the agitated birds as the scout birds, if they were even in the air, had been unable to pick us up in the fog.

After this we took a compass bearing north and proceeded to head in that direction ,without any further consultation of the compass, fully anticipating to emerge at the side of Slaley Forest which hereabouts runs in a broadly West to East direction for over two miles. After about three quarters of an hour we discovered what we thought was another colony but to our surprise had walked around in a complete circle and arrived back at the original colony! We had heard, like most of us, that when lost people tend to walk round in circles and we therefore took out our compass and walked on a north bearing (this time keeping an eye on the compass!) until we reached Slaley Forest, turned west along the forest edge and descended into Devils Water where there was some limited visibility.

In an article in an issue of “Strider”, which is the journal of the Long Distance Walkers Association, in mentioned that walking in circles is natural. A group based at the Max Planck Institute at Tubingen in Germany recently carried out a study into this phenomenon. The researchers used GPS to track peoples routes both in a large forest and in the Sahara Desert. Whilst walkers trying to keep a constant direction were able to follow a fairly straight course if the sun was visible they tended to walk round in circles if they could not see the sun or any other distinct landmark. They also observed walkers trying to go in a straight line when blindfolded and found that they walked in surprisingly small circles, often in a diameter of less than 20 metres (yes, twenty!). The paper in “Current Biology” suggests that walking in circles is a result of accumulating noise in the sensorimotor system.

The problem is of course resolved by always having your compass with you and using it continually if there is poor visibility and no known landmarks. Some might even add, do not walk with noisy people and l wonder who they might be!