Well, that was actually a good day’s wandering. The terrain was mostly flat and not too hard to walk around on. Lots of bumps that weren’t on the 1:50,000 scale map’s interpretation of the world, even more small pools of very deep water that weren’t on there too. Many many sinkholes and bogs that definitely weren’t on the map, and some raging torrents that were big enough to be given names by the map.

Still couldn’t see more than 50 metres in front of me though. Fortunately my waterproofs mostly worked, no waterproof being designed to keep you dry when crossing rivers and bogs that eat your feet. Can’t stop the stupid things riding up my back though, letting water right to my skin.
Phil gave us places to get to, and we had to work out the usual bearings and random timings to get there. Navigation’s easy if you can follow a little red needle and use your common sense. Common sense like if you walk around a big pool that happens to be in your way, you bother to walk around the other side so you’re back on the correct path, and don’t just walk to the side and continue walking forwards, religiously following your little red pointy arrow.

It’s interesting being lost. It’s even more interesting watching people get their nav wrong and make you lost. Watching someone contour around a hill without even noticing is different, then watching as the pick some random bump in the ground and proclaim it’s “probably around here, somewhere near this ring contour”. You can’t beat random guesswork when navigating. Unfortunately you can’t beat the person guessing, either.

I didn’t really care, we were on a big plateau which, if we walked randomly in any direction would have either made us go down hill into a valley, or start going up a mountain.
Eventually, after walking in circles for a while we worked out a strategy for getting un-lost. This involved deciding we were in one particular grid-square and plotting a random bearing off the hill, hopefully meeting a track.

Well, it worked. We trudged off in the mist, various people falling in bogs, and eventually came to a huge raging torrent that could only be one of two things on the map. We followed this down the hill and came to the Edge whereupon the cloud lifted and it stopped raining. It was as if the weather decided we’d escaped and it couldn’t be bothered any more.
There then followed a nasty trample down a gentle slope, a river crossing involving rope. Nope, I’d rather walk the extra “5Km” (it was just up the hill) to the bridge and go over that, I don’t like getting excessively wet feet and legs.