Reading contours in the Kurtuvėnai hills: knolls, hollows and spurs

Flat forest, hilly park

Around Šiauliai the forests we use are low and level, pine on sand with birch in the damp hollows, and a map of them is mostly black paths, blue ditches and the odd fence. You can navigate there for a year by paths alone and never once look at a contour. That is a good way to start and a bad place to stay, because the moment the paths run out you have nothing left to hold on to, and children notice that before adults do.

Kurtuvėnai Regional Park, about half an hour's drive to the south-west, is the opposite. The ice left behind a crumpled landscape of rounded hills, closed hollows, small lakes and long ridges, with Girnikai hill standing over the lot. Paths wander round the slopes rather than over them. It is the nearest place to the city where the brown lines on an orienteering map carry real information, and it is where we take anyone who has become comfortable with paths and a little too pleased about it.

What the brown lines are saying

A contour line joins points of equal height, and on the maps we draw they sit five metres apart, with every fifth one printed thicker. Lines close together mean a steep slope; lines far apart, a gentle one. The picture only becomes useful once you stop reading single lines and start reading shapes. A small closed ring is a knoll. A ring with little ticks pointing inward is a hollow. A run of V shapes shows either a small valley or a nose of higher ground.

That last one catches everybody. In a small valley, which orienteers call a re-entrant, the Vs of the contours point uphill, into the slope. On a spur, the nose of higher ground sticking out from a hill, the Vs point downhill, away from the top. Our rule for the children is blunt: if the Vs point at the hilltop you are in a dip, and if they point away from it you are on a nose. It is not elegant, but it sticks.

The exercises that worked

The single most useful exercise has been walking a contour. We choose a line on the map around the side of a hill, and each child tries to follow it on the ground without climbing or dropping, a stick in hand to point at the slope. It is harder than it sounds. After fifty metres most of us have drifted downhill, because walking downhill is easier, and seeing that happen under your own feet teaches more about height than any number of diagrams.

The second is what we call the shape game. One adult stands on a knoll, a spur or a hollow, and the children have to find that exact feature on the map, without a compass and without being told which way is north. They turn the map, look at the ground, turn it again, argue, and usually get it right. The argument is the valuable part. A child who has argued about a spur for five minutes does not forget what a spur is.

Only after these do we set a proper contour course, with flags on knolls, in re-entrants and at the foot of small steep banks, and most paths deliberately left off the map. The first time we tried it in Kurtuvėnai, the mistakes were all the same one: people reading the right shape on the wrong hill. The cure was simply to slow down and check the neighbouring shapes, the hollow to the left, the ridge behind, before committing to a direction.

Mistakes that keep coming back

A year on, the same errors still appear, only less often. Parallel errors are the worst: two similar re-entrants side by side, and a confident walker picks the wrong one and finds a perfectly good hollow with no flag in it. For beginners we now put the flag on a feature whose neighbours look different, and before anyone leaves the previous flag we talk through what the neighbouring shapes should be, so they know what the wrong answer looks like too.

The other is trusting in July a contour picture that was drawn in April. Bracken on the Kurtuvėnai slopes grows chest-high by midsummer and hides small knolls completely, and the lakeside hollows fill with water after a wet autumn. We walk the ground a week before every course and mark what has changed, and we still get surprised. A map describes the ground on the day someone walked it, which is worth saying out loud to children, and occasionally to their parents.