Catalog Category – Difference Between Default and Layered

You can retrieve the active category and output it's values

$category = Mage::registry('current_category');
echo $category->getName();
echo $category->getDescr();
// etc

This can be done from any existing PHTML file that is placed there or by adding your own file like so:

local.xml

<catalog_category_layered>
    <reference name="left">
        <block type="core/template" name="top_cat_title" before="-" template="catalog/category/custom_title.phtml"/>
    </reference>
</catalog_category_layered>

Now create a PHTML file in the templates catalog/category directory called custom_title.phtml and add the above PHP code.

This will display the current category data for you

Ok so found a solution.

I just loaded the full category object

   $category->load()

(as a side note, loading the full thing isn't a great idea in terms of implementation but it's a good way to see all of the attributes)

and then saw that it had this attribute [INCLUDE_IN_MENU] and I just used this to find out if a category is part of the top nav or not by

   if($child['include_in_menu'}){
       //do the business 
   }