Waypoint 1 · the app
Windrose
Map and compass, practised indoors.
Phones made everyone forget how to navigate, and then a flat battery on a hillside reminds them why it mattered. Windrose trains the skills that work without signal, satellites or charge. At its centre is a practice dial you turn with your finger: set a bearing and read it back in degrees, as a named point of the compass and as a quadrant bearing, until all three stop feeling like different languages.
- The rose
- Bearings
- Pacing
It uses no sensors at all. Windrose is a learning tool, not a live instrument, and its About page says so plainly: this is for practice, not for finding your way in the field.
Waypoint 2 · the lessons
Six ideas, in order
- 1Cardinal and intercardinal points, and what lies between them.
- 2Degrees against quadrant bearings: N40°E and 040° are the same arrow.
- 3Taking a bearing, and then actually following it.
- 4Back-bearings, and why the return leg is never a guess.
- 5Counting paces, and turning them into distance.
- 6Stringing several legs into a route.
Each idea is then tested where it counts. On an abstract practice map of labelled points you are asked to read the bearing from A to C, plot 120° from B, or give a back-bearing, and the app checks your answer against the real maths with a sensible tolerance, and scores it.
Waypoint 3 · the tools
Your stride, your rose
A pacing tool calibrates your own stride and converts paces to distance and back. A full compass rose reference opens at 8, 16 or 32 points. Progressive quizzes keep your best scores as your eye for bearings sharpens. Bearings, back-bearings and quadrant conversions are all computed properly underneath, so what you practise is exactly what a paper map and a protractor would give you.
Switch between degree and quadrant display, choose the detail of the rose, pick a topographic or paper backdrop, set your accent. Offline, no account, no ads.
Get Windrose on Google PlayPackage com.trailkeep.windrose
Practice, not a compass. Windrose reads no magnetometer and knows no position, so it can't tell you which way you are facing or where you are. Learning here is not the same as being equipped out there: take a real map and compass, learn declination and grid north from an instructor or a proper manual, tell someone your route, and carry a torch. In the UK, mountain rescue comes through 999 or 112, then ask for the police and mountain rescue.
Waypoint 4 · working out
How far off a sloppy bearing puts you
A bearing error isn't a mistake you notice; it's a slow sideways drift. The geometry is exact: walking distance d with an angular error θ lands you d · tan θ to the side. One degree is 17.5 metres per kilometre, which is where the old navigator's "one in sixty" comes from — that rule of thumb says 16.7 m, close enough to shout across a valley.
Walk two kilometres in one straight push with five degrees of slop and a five per cent pacing error and you can expect to finish about 202 metres from the target. Break the same two kilometres into four legs, each checked and re-aimed, and the expectation halves to about 101 metres: the errors stop adding up and start adding in quadrature, growing with the square root of the number of legs rather than with the route.
What's not here: no rose, no lessons, no practice map and no pacing calibration. This is error propagation on an idealised route: it assumes your mistakes are random rather than a consistent bias, ignores the ground, the wind, the dark and the temptation to follow a sheep track, and it never tells you a bearing. The practice is in the app.
Waypoint 5 · on paper
LumenMeadow Games
- Company
- SARAH SPRUCE LIMITED, trading as LumenMeadow Games
- Director
- Sarah Louise Spruce
- Registered office
- c/o TLW Solicitors Ltd, Centre for Advanced Industry, Coble Dene, North Shields NE29 6DE, United Kingdom
If a practice question marks a correct answer wrong, send the points and the bearing you gave. Tolerances are a judgement call and we would rather get them right.