I have a just post war RAF Navigators training 'book'. It has a cardboard page with a set of circles to represent various in-flight visibilities.
It has an exercise where the navigator is asked to plot a course home from observed landmarks. It's a good game and one which one off my instructors had played with me for real (is there more than one BPF?).
Much of what maxred banged on about is true, my comment elsewhere was in trying to understand how people would end up where they did. At my age it is all too daring and I would not have tried - but they did. How and why they thought it was achievable is the question.
In my immediate neck of the woods (circa 60 odd miles) I can get myself lost, but not for more than about 5 minutes odd, then a suitable landmark will appear. That was the whole point of the navigators game, even if you see 'nothing' it actually means something, because you now have a line of one joint of a finger or longer which you have to place so that you see 'nothing'.