I would imagine that on a local level guides could be found but it's more on a macro level - would a Norse commander in York, for instance, have an idea of where he was in relation to London, Winchester, Lincoln etc beyond knowing to march south and turn left at Newark to get to Lincoln.
Sorry for really late response.
I afraid this question is far beyond my ability to answer correctly, but I’ll illustrate the general geographical/ directional knowledge of the Norsemen in the Viking Age, as OP asked in the text of the thread, at first.
‘+ kitil×fastr × risti × stin + þina × iftiʀ × askut × faþur + sin × saʀ × uas × uistr × uk × ustr + kuþ ialbi × as × salu (U 504)
‘Ketilfastr raised this stone in memory of Ásgautr, his father. He was in the west and in the east. May God help his soul’.
Quoted from; https://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?table=mss&id=17328&if=runic
(Translation is also taken from WWW site above.)
This famous runic inscription U504 (early 11th century?), erected in Ubby, central Sweden, testifies that the Norsemen in the Viking Age already knew two main destinations of the Vikings, namely the East route (austrveg: Baltic – Russia – Constantinople) and the Western counterpart (vestrveg: to the British Isles). These famous Eastern- and Western- Routes of the Viking are not inventions of the modern scholars but had their origin in such use of the Norsemen themselves (Jesch 2000: 69).
In this context, another text cited below may be more interesting:
‘Ohthere told his lord, King Alfred, that he lived the furthest north (norþmest) of all the Northern People (Norþ-monna). He said that he lived in the north of that land (lande norþweardum) on the coast of the Atlantic (Westsæ).’’ Quoted from: Two Voyagers at the Court of King Alfred, ed. Niels Lund, York: William Sessions, p. 18.
Old English translation of Orosius, compiled at the court of King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871-99), includes some additional accounts of Northern Europe that had not been in original. The above-mentioned text, customarily dated to ca. 900, is one of them, based on the accounts of the Norseman Ohthere (usually translated Ottar in ON) who visited the court of the king (not as one of raiders, probably). As the term Westsæ (lit. trans: the Western sea) shows, we can suppose that non-English geographical sense of Ohthere can easily detected in this account. He narrates that he came from ‘the northernmost part’ of the land of ‘the Northern People’, though. It is not likely that this term of ‘Northern People’ itself was originally their self-name: Ohthere and his people, ‘Northern people’, adapted the cognitive geography of another people in the south who regarded their own location as a center of the known world. In short, Ohthere the Norsemen has already known that his homeland was not the center of the known world, but only a northernmost periphery of this cognitive map of the Northern Europe during the Viking Age, centered around Denmark or the coastal area of the North Sea. Hence, is it natural to suppose that the Norse raiders at least basic sense of directions as well as some rudimentary geographical knowledge around the North Sea?
As for the detailed knowledge of the Norsemen on the places in the British Isles (especially in the 9th century), we don’t have any reliable contemporary primary sources. It is worth noting, however, recent researches tend to think that some of the Vikings stayed around the British Isles for long, instead of doing round-trip between their Scandinavian homeland and the raiding ground in the British Isles as well as the European Continent. According to Crawford, the goal of the notorious ‘great army’ (865-874) and their leaders, Ivar, Halfdan, and Ubba, was to establish overlordship all of Britain and Ireland by controlling the waterway sea-lanes around the British Isles (Crawford 2003: 47-56). She even states that:
‘These far-travelled raiders/traders knew every sailing route, waterway, sound, and estuary round Britain and the Irish Sea, and that is why nearly every island, holm, and skerry has a Norse name – showing that they were thus designated by Scandinavian speakers. This is a well-known fact but little attention has been paid to its significance’ (Crawford 2003: 55f.).
Unfortunately, I don’t have enough knowledge of British place names to judge her assertion. If we accept this hypothesis, however, the Norsemen were also quite familiar with costal-offshore nautical geography around the British Isles.
It was actually much easier to find how the Anglo-Saxons got track of the raiders from the sea during the Viking Age: Beacons network! While extant sources are very fragmentary, some of recent researches propose a hypothesis that the Late Anglo-Saxons established beacon lookouts in several coastal area of the Southern England against the possible invaders from the sea (Hill & Sharp 2010). I cite some passages below from a key document (S 832), a grant charter of King Edward the Martyr to Ealdorman (comes) Æthelweard in 977:
‘……ab omni regali censu excepta expeditione arcisue munimine et uigiliis marinis......’
’[These granted lands are free] from all the royal dues, except for military service, the defense palisade, and the maritime vigilant……’
Archaeological excavation has found one of possible ruins of such beacons, dated in the early 11th century, in Yatesbury, Wiltshire. Archaeologists now suppose that it was only one of the beacon chains connecting Yatesbury and other contemporary sites like Silbury Hill and Marlborough within quite short distances of relay (ca. 6km), watching the movement of people rather on land there (Baker & Brooks 2016: 77f).
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