St Athans Sqn staff adopting the traditional "Windswept & Interesting" walking pose

Map reading is not as hard as many people think. There are only a few basics you need to know and then it is all down to practice. We teach our cadets all the skills that they will need in order to successfully map read in the worst possible conditions. This way a walk on a nice day can be enjoyed more, as less emphasis is spent on map reading and more on enjoying the day.

One of the best ways to learn to map read is through navigation exercises and the best sort of navigation exercise that can be done without a real risk of danger is Micro-Navigation This is very similar to orienteering, but the points you are walking between are not always actual physical objects.

Note how all the cadets are facing in different directions!! Never a good sign

As you can see from this photo of a recent Micro Nav ex held by St Athans sqn on the hills above Ebbw Vale, there's not exactly a lot of features to use for the Cadets to navigate to/from on this type of exercise!

All of the staff running these exercises are fully trained at either B.E.L.A or M.L. level and have all been through these exercises themselves previouslly. This does not mean however that they will take over if the cadets make a navigation mistake! As sometimes the best way to learn is by making mistakes in a safe and controlled environment As you can see here by the expression on Mr Pritchards face, the staff weren't exactly impressed when walking a leg for 4 minutes too long made the cadets loose their position!

After the group finally decided that they had no idea exactly where they were, they stopped for lunch! As all the legs of the exercise were only short and we could at all times see the main road in the far distance it was quite a dramatic learning experience for all involved not to be able to say exactly where they were. It worked out in the end that they were less than 100m from where they should have been and that caused a 1.5 hr delay whilst they worked back to a known feature and tried again!

NOTE: The above exercise finally finished only 1.5 hrs overtime, as once they found themselves again the entire group switched back on. All the cadets involved agreed that they had definitely learnt something that day.