Why learning in the outdoors should be a key experience in all schools

May 16, 2013 – 10:18 am

Andy Robinson CEO of the Institute for Outdoor Learning writes about the importance of outdoor learning.

The Department for Education is currently reviewing the National Curriculum seeking to improve the core skills and knowledge amongst school age children.  Given the innovative approach to incorporating learning for sustainability and the use of the outdoors that is being developed by the Scottish Government the limited reference to these issues in the current DfE proposal is disappointing.

If you’re interested in how the Scottish Government is integrating the outdoors into teaching see their helpful guidance to teachers.  Essentially this guidance points to outdoor learning as a vehicle for many subject areas, rather than a discipline within the PE or Geography curriculum. ‘All aspects of the curriculum can be explored outside. The sights, sounds and smells of the outdoors, the closeness to nature, the excitement most children feel, the wonder and curiosity all serve to enhance and stimulate learning.’

Children walking on the Hidden Bridge at Stackpole, Pembrokeshire.

Children walking on the Hidden Bridge at Stackpole, Pembrokeshire. ©National Trust Images/John Millar

So why should we be pushing Government to provide clear guidance on the effective use of outdoor learning and to train teachers up to enable them to incorporate use of the outdoors into their lessons ? Here are a couple of reasons quite apart from the enhancement of learning.

The World Wildlife Fund’s 2012 Living Planet Report shows that globally, humanity is currently using 50% more resources than the planet can sustain.  The issue of sustainability may be one that the current generation feel able to file under ‘too hard to deal with’ but it is surely one that we must at a minimum start helping the next generation prepare for.  Exploring the issues around the sustainability of our relationships with the natural world becomes a memorable and meaningful lesson when based in the natural world rather than the classroom.

The outdoors also provides a wealth of opportunities for children to learn about risk, recognise it and develop ways of managing it.  To quote Judith Hackitt, the Chair of the Health & Safety Executive “The next generation is tomorrow’s workforce. Helping young people to experience and handle risk is part of preparing them for adult life and the world of work. Young people can gain this experience from participating in challenging and exciting outdoor events made possible by organisations prepared to adopt a common sense and proportionate approach that balances benefits and risk.” ¹

Child taking a close look at wildlife in the garden at Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, Cheshire.

Child taking a close look at wildlife in the garden at Quarry Bank Mill, Styal, Cheshire. ©National Trust Images/John Millar

The activities that the schools use do not need to be so adventurous that the teacher requires expert help.  Bug hunts in the school grounds or local park or orienteering in similar environments are manageable by many teachers.  A wealth of resources and help is available from more experienced outdoor practitioners.  Some schools have developed a progressive approach to accessing outdoor learning starting with exploring nature in the school grounds through experimenting with water filtration in the local stream and moving on to incorporating initiatives like Duke of Edinburgh’s Award or John Muir Award so the students gain recognition as well as learning.

¹ Quoted in ‘Nothing Ventured…..balancing risks and benefits in the outdoors’, an excellent publication by Tim Gill that debunks some commonly held myths about outdoor adventurous activities for school.

The Institute for Outdoor Learning is the UK wide professional body for outdoor learning practitioners.  As a charity its primary objects are to develop standards in outdoor learning and promote access to all forms of outdoor learning.  If you are interested in supporting or participating in the work of the institute please contact us at 01228 564580 or visit our website www.outdoor-learning.org

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Are we afraid of the outdoors?

May 14, 2013 – 10:06 am

The news can keep you indoors, writes David Bond

The full horror that took place within 2207 Seymour Avenue in Cleveland is private.  Only the victims can know it. 24-hour news media seeks to get as close as possible to their pain.  Video footage, testimony, pictures, interviews, artists’ impressions and journalists’ guesswork give us the wire-framework onto which we construct a voyeur’s view of the events. The details are seared into our brains, our curiosity is sated and our own worst fears are justified and compounded.

The initial thought, how awful for the victim, turns to, how awful if that happened to my child, and then, if I’m not careful that will happen to my child.

The message from the media – never explicit, but bubbling below the panic – is don’t take your eye off your child.  If you let them wander freely, a predator will take them.

During the making of my upcoming film Project Wild Thing, I met with mums of young children who talked about why they are nervous letting their children play outside unsupervised. The Holly and Jessica story is back out in the news again, and you hear those cases and you can’t help but think about it, one young mum told me.

Do these horrific child abduction news stories make us afraid of the outdoors?

Children playing in a tree, Dovedale, Derbyshire. Restrictions ©National Trust Images/John Millar

Children playing in a tree, Dovedale, Derbyshire. Restrictions
©National Trust Images/John Millar

When I was growing up there was no 24-hour news but we did have our own kind of risk-aversion propaganda. I would play near a fast flowing river with friends. Rumour had it that someone once drowned in the river. No one knew who this person was, or when it was, or if it was even the same river. I used to be really good at jumping off walls and curbs on my bike. Apparently someone died doing that, once, somewhere. I got the picture. I needed to remember to stay safe when there were no adults around. But we were sensible and looked out for each other, so these stories didn’t stop us wanting to roam.

I recently interviewed writer Tim Gill. The worst case scenario is not a helpful scenario to spend very much time in as a parent, he said.  You’re constantly being drawn to the downside of risk. Tim believes we need to strike a balance between protecting our children and giving them the freedom they need to learn how to look after themselves.

But perhaps stories of children going missing still make the news precisely because they are a rare occurrence. It is some comfort that we are very familiar with the names of missing children. Whilst the idea of such a tragic event happening to you or your loved ones is unimaginable, the odds remain vanishingly small.

Warwick Cairns’ book How To Live Dangerously considers the risks of living too safely. He explains that the actual risk of a child being abducted and murdered by a stranger is 0.00007%, which equates to 1-in-1.4 million-years. But if you still feel like this is a risk you would rather not take then please remember that keeping children safely at home is by no means risk-free. A child dies at home from flames or smoke inhalation once every ten days. If that made as good a news story as abductions, we’d actively chase them out of the house.

We should worry less about the risk of rare events like child abduction and murder, and more about the slow, creeping emergence of a generation of children out of touch with their world. Ultimately our children will suffer at the hands of something far more inevitable and relentless than a predator. They are going stay indoors and suffer because we fail to judge risks. The consequence of this for their future environment is unimaginable.

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National Children’s Day: Let kids be kids

May 13, 2013 – 10:58 am

If we let kids be kids then their imaginations can run wild and their creativity can flourish, writes Hattie Garlick.

Where are mini conservationists, zoologists and explorers made? Is it on their first trip to London Zoo, squinting through the bars at a Sumatran Tiger taking his tea? Or the first school field trip, peering out at a sodden landscape from under an anorak hood? No. In my experience, for my son at least, it happened two weeks ago, in a friend’s garden, while I was looking the other way. 

After half an hour of intense silence, prodding a stick into a pond and examining frogspawn, he asked to take some home. We scooped some into a jam jar, filled an old coke bottle with pond water, and cycled home via a nerve-racking and leaky trip round Sainsburys.

They lived in a yellow bucket in the garden, under the grave and vigilant guard of an enrapt two year old. And last week, they turned into tadpoles.

Tiny frog in a child's hands at Stourhead, Wiltshire, in September. Copyright ©National Trust Images/Nick Daly

Tiny frog in a child’s hands at Stourhead, Wiltshire, in September. Copyright ©National Trust Images/Nick Daly

Our kids don’t always need us to prompt and prod their enthusiasm for learning. That instinct, that spark of curiosity and need to explore how the world works, is innate within them. And sometimes, we blundering well-meaning adults who have lost that connection with the world, just get in the way. We talk about the importance of play, but then trip ourselves up with the urge to quantify it in adult terms – what impact is it having? What are its results or its ‘value’?

As Bill Gates has said, “If you’ve ever watched a child with a cardboard carton and a box of crayons create a spaceship with cool control panels, or listened to their improvised rules… they you know that this impulse… at the heart of innovative childhood play…. is also the essence of creativity.”

National Children’s Day UK (http://www.nationalchildrensdayuk.com/) is about making sure that, at least one day a year, we stop to appreciate and liberate that instinct in our kids. Big players from the National Trust to Play England and Eureka, the national children’s museum, have signed up. It’s the easiest call to arms ever issued to adults: on May 15th, simply step back and let them take the creative lead, wherever that ends up. Maybe they will build a cardboard space ship, unleash their inner adventurer through the National Trust’s 50 Things to do before you’re 11 3/4, nurturing tadpoles or, as William Bake wrote,

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wildflower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour

Hattie Garlick is a Director of the Save Childhood Movement (http://www.savechildhood.net/) and writes a blog, Free our Kids, on raising her son for free in a big city (www.freeourkids.co.uk)

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Bluebells

May 10, 2013 – 9:00 am

Continuing our celebration of spring and getting outdoors, leading travel writer for The Times – Christopher Somerville – capture’s the wonder of a walk in a perfect ‘fairy’ bluebell wood.

‘O, that lone flower recalled to me

My happy childhood’s hours,

When bluebells seemed like fairy gifts,

A prize among the flowers.’

In this simple verse Anne Brontë tells it like it is. There’s something about our first encounters with bluebells which tastes of pure magic, that flood of intense blue released across the oakwood floor as if from some generous sorcerer’s hand. Beatrix Potter’s fable of guinea pigs and a travelling circus, The Fairy Caravan, is a disregarded tale these days; but I loved it in childhood for its description of the bluebells in enchanted Pringle Wood, ‘as blue as a bit of sky come down.’ That exactly caught it.

There are memorable bluebell walks on dozens of National Trust properties – for example, the superb displays among the trees at Stourhead in Wiltshire, along the steep gorge of Allen Banks near Hexham, Northumberland, and in the woods on Toy’s Hill, site of Octavia Hill’s pioneering gift of land in 1898 to the infant National Trust.

There’s no doubting the therapeutic effect of these magical flowers. In the late 1880s Lady Louisa Knightley of Fawsley Hall in Northamptonshire provided a bolthole in her gamekeeper’s cottage for one of the most wretched and alienated men in history – Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, an outcast because of the mysterious affliction that hideously distorted his face, skin and body. Merrick loved walking in the Fawsley bluebell woods, breathing free air and casting off his demons for a few short days.

As a symbol of spring in full flow in these islands, the bluebell has no rival. Recently, however, a fierce if silent struggle has been going on between the familiar species and a foreign invader. You’ll usually find our native bluebell growing in woods or very shady places. It’s easily distinguished, because the flowers are sweet-scented; and they grow on the same side of the stalk, so that their weight bends the head of the plant into a downward-hanging curve. The interloping Spanish bluebells, on the other hand, tend to shun woods and look for sunnier locations. The flowers are all but scentless, and they grow all round the stalk, so that although they hang down like those of the English bluebell, their weight is evenly distributed and the stalk itself stands straight. The two species interbreed; and when they do, it’s the Spanish genes that dominate. So keep your eyes peeled for the real deal!

Ashridge credit Rebecca Judge rs

  • Christopher Somerville’s latest book, ‘Where To See Wildife In Britain And Ireland’, is published by Harper Collins on 25 April. He’ll be talking about it at Stanfords Bookshop, Corn Street, Bristol on that date.
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“The world’s not such a bad place”

May 9, 2013 – 9:21 am

“The world’s not such a bad place,” says Calvin, of Calvin and Hobbes fame, “when you can get out in it.”

One word sums up the current experience of children in Britain: “enclosure.”  It is a cultural peculiarity: no previous generation has known it, and traditional societies all over the world have given children a precious freedom.

Once out of infancy, Native American children were traditionally free to wander wherever they wanted.  Lakota children “grew up without a sense of restriction and confinement.  Their faculties became accustomed to space and distance… and to freedom in its full meaning,” writes Lakota chief Luther Standing Bear.

Freedom makes children competent, and I’ve seen Sámi children aged ten and younger sent trekking for hours through fog on the tundra, looking for lost reindeer, and fully trusted to be able to look after themselves.  Inuit boys of fourteen or fifteen would traditionally have the freedom – and the skill – to journey alone with a dog team over hundreds of miles of Arctic ice, and I was told how the freedom which Inuit children traditionally experienced was crucial to their characters, and made them into “self-reliant, caring and self-controlled individuals.”

Indigenous Australian Bob Randall speaks of his childhood and its “non-restrictive nature, psychically and physically.  I was always totally free.”  He too links it with qualities of wise strength: a freedom which meant autonomy but not licence.

Children with a cat in the garden at Springhill, County Londonderry.

Children with a cat in the garden at Springhill, County Londonderry. Copyright ©National Trust Images/Arnhel de Serra

This is not only an issue of physical liberty but the freedom of the psyche within the natural world, reflecting children’s easy and extraordinary acceptance that they can imagine their way into the minds of animals.  (Any child, asked what their pet is thinking, will assume the question is eminently sensible.)  Indigenous societies traditionally encourage this sympathy of child psyche with animal world, through ritual and dance and story, as part of the inter-relationship of humans and nature.  Pueblo Indian children, by tradition, from three years old, transform themselves into animals: antelope and deer, donning fox skins or parrot feathers, and embodying and embracing the kinship.

The vision quest is one profound way in which children form connections with the natural world, and the essential mindcraft of this quest is just as familiar to our society as to any other, but it has been relegated to fairy tales.  In fairy tale quest and vision quest alike, the child must go alone, questing for insight.  Isolation, fasting and prayer are features of the traditional vision quest, and it mirrors the lonely, often orphaned and hungry fairy tale hero, full of wishes as fervent as prayers. They take to the woods, to the mountains, to the wilds, as do children undergoing a vision quest.  Once, there, both fairy tale hero and questing child must listen to the “animal-helpers” for wisdom, must learn lessons of generosity, courage, perseverance and profound self-reliance.  Keeping children enclosed away from nature also means alienating them from their own stronger selves.

……………………

Jay Griffiths is the author of “KITH: The Riddle of the Childscape” and is in the feature-length documentary, Project Wild Thing, screening in summer 2013. Watch a trailer for the film here.

Find out more on her official website.

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Endymion’s Wood

May 8, 2013 – 12:17 pm

Spring has finally sprung; and what better way to get the kids outside at this time of year, than exploring the magic of a local bluebell wood? We asked top nature writer for the Guardian – Paul Evans – to capture an image through the medium of words of his idea of the perfect bluebell wood.

Endymion’s Wood

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” wrote Keats in his poem about the mythical shepherd Endymion who slept in a wood under the spell of the moon goddess. There is such a wood of sweet dreams: a secret place, a little way from the Shropshire village where a path climbs above a stream and then peters out into a thicket of blackthorn past a tumbledown cottage which is said to be haunted. Only the few who know Endymion’s Wood can find it.

Following the ways of badger and deer, where wood anemone and yellow archangel flower at the foot of old hazel clumps, you are lured into the wood by the little metronome calls of chiffchaff and the cuckoo echoing through tall ash trees in air cleansed by last night’s rain. The trees open into wide glades in which a few ancient holly and oak trees stand in a pool of bluebells stretching as far as you can see.

There are no waymarked trails through Endymion’s Wood, no interpretation boards or notices telling you what you can and can’t do and due to a disputed will a century ago, no one knows who owns it. Rumour and superstition put people off visiting the place and because no one comes cutting trees down or shooting, the wildlife have lost their fear of humans. Roe deer lay up here during the day, badgers tumble from their huge sett in the bank at dusk and tawny owls pass silently down the glades. Sitting with your back against an oak, listening to the songs of willow warblers and the drumming of woodpeckers as sunlight plays across rippling bluebells and their strange, sweet fragrance seeps into your soul, it’s hard to remember the outside world and all its anxieties. You drift into a dream-like state, the sleep of the moon goddess, as the inhabitants of Endymion Wood go about their lives.

Roused only by the chill of approaching nightfall or a passing shower, you carefully retrace your steps, struggling through the ghostly blackthorn blossom at the ruin, back onto the path which follows the stream up to the village. Many of you I’m sure will know that Endymion is also the scientific name for bluebell and you’re probably sceptical that such a place actually exists today. When you get to the village, go and talk to the locals about Endymion Wood in the pub. It’s called the Moon Under Water.

What does your perfect bluebell wood look like?

What does your perfect bluebell wood look like?

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“Playful Risk” in Bath and North East Somerset

May 7, 2013 – 1:48 pm

Children have a natural tendency to explore, have fun and take risks. This is a part of growing up and something we all want to encourage safely. Safety should not equal boring. Safety should support fun. Bath & North East Somerset Council have launched a ‘Toolkit’ to help improve play opportunities; be it a fun activity or an exciting play space!

The toolkit is designed to help Council staff and other organisations working with children in the area to weigh up the risks and the benefits when children play – to make it fun, stimulating and challenging. There is more about this on our website, along with the Risk Benefit ‘Toolkit’.

Wood team in playful space.

Wood team in playful space.

“If you step there and hold onto that bit, then you can step across.” said one smiling tree climbing boy to his friend – who had a rather bemused look on his face! (I love to see children finding fun in a challenge and, without even realising it, learning to be safe and to support each other.)

We put the risk-benefit approach into action when we created our first natural play space in a public woodland managed by the Council. My colleagues and I came up with a number of ideas based on what material was already available in the woodland, but we eventually decided to make use of a large felled tree resting on a steep slope, by carving giant steps into it. The feature invites local children and adults to climb, explore and spend time in a green space, which previously was only used by dog walkers.

I showed the plans to pupils at St Michael’s CoE Junior School who loved our ideas and said that they would visit the wood more often if it had these play features. I also spoke to parents outside the school and they too thought it was a great idea.

The play space was created in a single morning by members of the Council’s Parks & Estates, Events and Play Teams who enjoyed rolling up their sleeves and getting outdoors for a morning. One team cleared the lightweight wood from the fallen trees and took it up to the top of the slope, while another hammered stakes into the ground and fed the thinner sticks through them to create a ‘lookout’ with a beautiful oval entrance, which was positioned so that the climb up the giant steps leads straight to it. It was amazing to see how easily interesting shapes can be created from a few lengths of bendy hazel!

We also cleared litter from the area and arranged some of the larger logs into a sociable spot to sit and enjoy a well-earned cup of tea and a bun after the hard physical exertion of a morning moving wood. At some point in the near future, we are also hoping to install a simple swing just a bit further down the path.

Playing outdoors.

Playing outdoors.

A group of children from the nearby school were accompanied by local Councillors in a concerted litter pick before being given the first opportunity to try out the new play space. The children didn’t stop playing the whole time and when asked if they enjoyed it, there was a big cheer, whilst one child observed of the tree trunk, “It looks like a crocodile!”

Some of the children were initially a bit nervous about climbing up the giant steps and coming back down again – one said: “It was scary coming down, so I went down on my bum!” One little girl was particularly anxious but with the help of a member of the Council’s Play Team she made the climb and on reaching the top her face lit up. She then climbed it again on her own and her confidence visibly grew larger as she relished her sense of achievement. This is exactly what these play opportunities are designed for.

The beautiful and challenging space demonstrates that through taking simple, low-cost steps to improve play opportunities we can simultaneously promote an approach to reasonable risk taking in play. By using the Risk Benefit Toolkit to make an assessment of the site, we concluded that the many benefits of being active, creative, out in nature, and the improved health and wellbeing that this would offer, far outweighed the real, yet reasonably low risks of playing there.

Jeremy Dymond – Play & Community Development Officer, Bath & North East Somerset Council

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What bike adventure will you start today?

May 5, 2013 – 9:30 am
Sean Conway

Sean Conway

The bicycle: The most efficient form of transport ever invented. There is no wonder why millions all over the word use it. Where could your bike take you? In 2012 my bicycle took me 16,000 miles through 25 countries on 6 continents around the world. The moment I got on my bike the entire world opened up to me. I was in France in a day, Germany the next and a week later I was exploring the beautiful coastline of Croatia. I cycled across America, through the outback in Australia and into the heart of The Atacama Desert. There weren’t many places in the world that my bike couldn’t take me.

Sean Conway

Sean Conway

You don’t have to cycle around the world to have an incredible adventure. A bicycle can also help you explore where you live. Getting on a bike and riding some of Britain’s incredible back roads is one of the best experiences you can do. Nothing beats getting up on a Saturday morning with some friends and planning a beautiful bike ride. It’ll be tough on the up hills and exhilarating on the down hills and when you return home all covered in mud, very sweaty and extremely tired, you’ll not only have achieved something but also had a great time doing it. Whether you are eight or eighty you can easily jump on a bike and start an adventure right from your doorstep. There is no wonder cycling is one of the fastest growing sports in Britain.

What bike adventure will you start today?

Sean Conway is an endurance adventurer. Last year he cycled around the world, suffering whip lash and fracturing his spine in the process. He is currently in training for his latest adventure: swimming around the British coast from Lands End to John O’Groats. Find out more about Sean here. 

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Squash Falconer blogs about the nation’s number 1 thing to do before 11 ¾: climbing a tree

May 4, 2013 – 9:30 am

To celebrate the re-launch this week of 50 things to do before you’re 11¾, as chosen by the nation, adventurer and mountaineer, Squash Falconer, has written about the nation’s number 1 favourite thing to do before you’re 11¾: climbing a tree.

I loved climbing trees when I was younger, I still do now!

Visitors in the garden at Quarry Bank Mill, Wilmslow, Cheshire.

Visitors in the garden at Quarry Bank Mill, Wilmslow, Cheshire. Copyright ©National Trust Images/Paul Harris.

Trees represented adventure and freedom.  They made great look outs, ideal hiding places, safe havens and were a place to go to get away from adults and do what I wanted in my own space.  They were fun and exciting.

The challenge of climbing a tree was always different, some were easy with large branches that I could happily wrap my limbs around to pull, push or hoist myself up.  Others presented a greater challenge.

My favourite tree was very tall, it sat in a small wood just behind the great big hay barns we had on the farm where I grew up.  From the top I was higher than the barns and I could see for miles around.  It was not an easy tree to climb but I liked that, because it was difficult it meant I was the only one who could get up there – to my secret place.

It would take me a while to get to the top.  The first branch was much taller than me so I wrestled a huge metal bin to the base, which I could then stand on to reach it.  I’d swing my body on the branch until I had enough momentum to get one leg high enough and throw it up around the branch.  My other followed and from the upside down position I could pull myself into a sitting position.  It was a welcome rest.

The first part was always the most physically demanding, I knew once I was on that branch I had cracked it.  Some days I couldn’t muster the strength to get on it.  From that first branch I can still climb the tree in my head.  I learnt how to navigate the many branches; I knew which ones were strong enough to hold my weight and which weren’t.  I knew where to place my feet and I knew where all my hand grabs were.

Some days I’d stay at the top for a while; there was always a new view, always things to see that my eyes hadn’t noticed before, occasionally I’d take sweets up with me and other days I’d just sit and think.

Getting down was an altogether different task.  It required a deep breath and commitment to putting my feet down firmly on the strong branches and always having a safety hold with one of my hands.

Whether going up or down I was always racing against myself to see if I could do it faster.

I suppose at the time, I was ‘just’ climbing a tree.  Reflecting back now I can see that there was so much more to it.

I was learning about my body, how to lift myself, how to move myself.  I was gaining strength.  I was independent, I did my own risk assessments and I was responsible.  I had my own space up there; I was a thinker in my tree.  And best of all, it was an adventure, every time I climbed it!

Squash’s latest adventure, ElliptiGo Europe, sees her team up with adventurer Dave Cornthwaite to trek 3000 miles across Western Europe by ElliptiGo elliptical bicycle. Find out more on Squash’s website, Twitter (@squashfalconer) and Facebook page.

 

 

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Jon Culshaw blogs about stargazing, number 27 on the 50 things list

May 3, 2013 – 12:22 pm

To celebrate the re-launch this week of 50 things to do before you’re 11¾, as chosen by the nation, we talk to impressionist, comedian and keen astronomer, Jon Culshaw, about number 27 on the new list: stargazing.

What attracted you to astronomy as a child?

When I was a lad of six I read ‘ The Observers Book of Astronomy’  by Patrick Moore from front to back. Instantly, I was fascinated and and a lifelong interest began right there.

To stare upward on a perfectly clear, starlit night, I challenge anybody not to be impressed and feel a great sense of awe. I remember borrowing my Dad’s binoculars to look at the mountains and craters of  the Moon. Then looking around the stars and learning which of those ‘stars’ were Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn in our Solar System.  Then navigating my way around the rest of the night sky, imagining people from ancient times who dreamt up the names for the constellations. To my young mind it was enthralling to think of how there’s so much more than just what we know on Planet Earth. To know we’re part of a much bigger ecosystem spreading through the entire solar system, through the entire Galaxy, though the entire Universe! Maybe many Universes. It made you feel on the one hand very tiny and insignificant. Then again, to think of ourselves as part of something so incredible makes you feel very important.

Detail of the orrery in the library at Dunham Massey, surrounded by signs of the zodiac and a calendar

Detail of the orrery in the library at Dunham Massey, surrounded by signs of the zodiac and a calendar. Copyright ©National Trust Images/Chris King

What is the best thing you’ve seen in astronomy?

Seeing the total solar eclipse in August 1999. I was able to sail on a ferry to where the  skies were clearest, we were very lucky and had an unforgettable experience. If anybody has the chance to see a total solar eclipse, then they should absolutely grab it. It is the most incredible thing in nature that it’s possible to see.

Where is your favourite place to look at the sky?

You need somewhere where there’s a dark sky devoid of light pollution from towns and cities. The Sky at Night did an episode from Kielder Observatory in Northumberland a few weeks back. It’s a wonderful place for astronomy. With its dark skies and remoteness it’s very atmospheric, even eerie. The Caribbean is a wonderful place, too. In hot countries the skies tend to be clearer and less shimmery. The ‘seeing’ as astronomers say is good.

Have you any special memories of stargazing as a child?

Seeing Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn through a telescope for the first time. I remember being enthralled that I was seeing the real objects, actual other planets. Not just illustrations, diagrams or photos from some textbook.

Anyone who sees Saturn through a telescope is unlikely ever to forget it. Saturn is a great planet to see as your first. It’s a great one to spark an interest that will just last a lifetime. Saturn is a wonderfully familiar image in astronomy, the gas giant with the rings around it. But to actually see it – to observe the real object in the sky – that takes your breath away at first.  I had to momentarily step back from the telescope after my first Saturn view. I felt wobbly and knock kneed!

Night sky at Ennerdale, Cumbria.

Night sky at Ennerdale, Cumbria. Copyright ©National Trust Images/Joe Cornish

Just to get your head around the immense scale, size and distances of the Universe is wonderfully mind-blowing. Finding out about star formation and the way the solar-system and the universe works is spell-binding. It doesn’t take much to be absolutely enthralled. That’s far better than spending endless hours dead eyed on video games.

The great thing about stargazing is that anyone can try it – and at their own pace. There are lots of things you can see with the naked eye, such as the different phases of the Moon or the Northern Lights. With binoculars you can start to look at star clusters like the Pleiades, which to the naked eye don’t look like much, but get them in your binoculars and it’s like turning on the city Christmas lights. Up another level, you can find a telescope and start to see the planets in greater detail. The Cassini Division – the gap in Saturn’s rings. The Moon’s of Jupiter can be seen as they orbit, sometimes casting their shadows onto Jupiter’s disc. Look further out and find deeper sky objects – those objects that are truly innumerable lights years away.

What advice would you give to a young person interested in finding out more about astronomy?

Just get out there and do it! Watch the programmes of the great astronomy communicators: watch The Sky at Night, watch programmes with Sir Patrick Moore or Carl Sagan. Watch episodes of Wonders of the Universe with Professor Brian Cox. The enthusiasm of these great astronomy broadcasters is infectious. Watch them and it will pass on to you.

And remember: astronomy is not some out of reach, overly scientific discipline. You can explore it at your own pace and in your own way. Just get out there, try it, and make a start. As Dr Paul Abel said “Welcome to the Universe. You’ll never leave”

You can watch Jon on flagship BBC astronomy programme The Sky at Night or follow him on Twitter (@jonculshaw to find out more about his adventures in astronomy.

If you’re interested in finding out more about stargazing, have a look at the entry for stargazing on the 50 Things website or check out BBC Space. The National Trust has lots of places that are perfect for stargazing. We’ve put together a list of seven of our favourites. Earlier this year the Brecon Beacons became an accredited Dark Sky reserve. Find out more here.

By annarawcliffe | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)
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