Hippocampal damage impairs navigation with respect to information provided by the shape of an arena. Recent evidence has suggested that normal rats use local geometric information, as opposed to a global geometric representation, to navigate to a correct corner. One implication of this pattern of results is that hippocampal lesions may impair processing of 1 or more of the local geometric features of an environment. The authors therefore investigated the effects of hippocampal cell loss in rats on navigation to a hidden goal with respect to a variety of local cues in an environment with a distinctive shape. Rats with lesions of the hippocampus were impaired in discriminating a right-angled corner from its mirror image. However, they were able to use cues provided by an acute-angled corner (Experiment 1) or a local polarizing cue (Experiment 2). In contrast, lesioned rats were impaired in discriminating long versus short walls (Experiment 3). Results indicate that the hippocampus plays a role in disambiguating locations by processing (metric) information related to the distance between corners.