Crop Circle Madness

One thing Hampshire's never been short of are crop circles.
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These curious phenomena have appeared around Winchester for decades. Nobody really knows why - except the enormous rolling fields make a wonderful canvas for these distinctive markings - and it's easy to enjoy them in all their glory from the big roads like the M3 and the A31.

Tina's mother called the other day and randomly suggested Tina stand in the middle of one to enjoy it's mystical 'healing properties.'

Curiously, a crop circle appeared in a field of peas next to Intech just a few days later, on the A31/A272 junction. Since such startling serendipity had occurred, Tina and I decided to try her mother's theory out.

This was our introduction to the world of Crop Circles.
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Our Crop Circle.

Tina and I pulled to a halt on the A272 heading towards Petersfield to plot our trek to Winchester's latest crop circle. This was within spitting distance of the Matterley Bowl, site of some of the most famous crop circles originating from the early eighties.

As you can see from the picture - our crop circle looked deceptively close. In actual fact, the circle had an enormous diameter and was miles away from the road in the middle of an enormous field of infant peas.
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Tina and I bravely set off to try and locate the centre. This was more of an adventure than we'd originally anticipated. Obviously we didn't want to go trampling the farmer's crops, so we tried to locate tractor paths to wade through.
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The tractor trick was something we learned from Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, two Brits who started making their own crop circles back in the late seventies. In the nineties, they revealed their secrets - including that all crop circles are intersected by at least one set of tractor tracks. This allows chaps like them to get to their target without leaving a tell-tale path hacked through the crops. The lack of an entry point keeps a determined few still believing that crop circles have extraterrestial origins.
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Whether or not aliens were behind our crop circle, Tina and I found Bower and Chorley's tell-tale tractor tracks and headed off through the forest of peas.

Peas are actually surprisingly dense plants. By the time we'd gone too far to turn back, the ocean of Bird's Eye's favourite was practically swallowing us. I managed slightly better than Tina, being a mite taller. But the only way was onwards and upwards to our target...




One thing both Tina and I noticed was that the peas grew considerably taller and greener the closer to the circle we got. While they'd generally been at elbow length for my poor wife, they green crops started to swallow her up completely as we neared our destination.

Eventually we managed to reach the crop circle, which was immense. If it had been Doug and Dave (or some of their followers) who'd created this immense swirl of fallen crops, they'd been very busy boys.
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Once we'd made it, Tina soaked up the mystical energies and I did a little bit of research into the crop circle itself.
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The first thing that I noticed was the way the crops had been bent over.

The common theory - or at least what Chorley and Bower claim to do - is to gently flatten the crops to the ground with a length of plank - using a rope and a central point to create the geometrically perfect circles that this phenomenon is famed for.

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That wasn't exactly what we discovered in our crop circle. The peas had been flattened, yes. But they weren't pushed down in any one particular direction. Like badly brushed hair, clumps of the peas were crushed in all directions.
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The stalks themselves were bent and warped - many of them pulled out of the dirt completely. The couple of pictures I took didn't really manage to capture the strange conditions of the flattened crops.
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The thing that was really funny was exactly where the circle was located. As you can see from my 'cowboy pose' picture, just across the road from the crop circles was Winchester's science and technology institute, INTECH.
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With it's alien looking buildings and enormous satellite dishes, it's almost possible to believe that curious aliens could have been zooming around, checking it out. Why they'd stop in a field of peas to 'mark their territory' however is beyond me!

Anyway. After snapping a few pictures, Tina and I braved the seas of peas and waded our way back down the tractor paths towards our car.
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No close encounters occurred during our adventure!

Crop Circles

Our little crop circle adventure did inspire me to find out a little more about the phenomenon. I'd first heard about crop circles in the eighties and nineties, when I was growing up on a farm in Four Marks. We used to drive down the A31 (where Tina and I discovered our crop circle) and those massive fields of wheat, barley and oilseed rape were regular targets.

But crop circles actually have a far longer history than that. The first mention of crop circles actually took place back in 1678 (exactly three hundred years before Chorley and Bower started making theirs.)

A woodcut pamphlet was circulated around Hartford Shire depicting the devil cutting a strange circular pattern in a field of crops - the pamphlet explained that a farmer was so infuriated with the outrageous prices he was being charged for his crops being cut that he'd rather "the devil himself" scythed them down.

Next came John Rand Capron, a Victorian scientist, who recorded strange circular patterns in crop fields following a violent storm in Surrey during 1880. These seem to be the earliest dated 'crop circles' as we know them today. He blamed strange cyclones for causing them.

But crop circles didn't really hit the headlines until the 70's and 80's, when they started cropping up across Hampshire and Wiltshire in significant numbers. Newspapers reported that this sudden pandemic of circles were created by natural phenomenon. Other people suggested that they were created by aliens, marking their visiting sites after arriving on earth.

It appears the truth was far more mundane.

In the 1990s, Doug Chorley and Dave Bowers, the first and most famous 'circlemakers,' held up their hands and claimed responsibility.

They'd been busted by man's greatest enemy - the wife.

Dave Chorley's wife had pinned him down, wondering why he was disappearing off late and night and why there was such high mileage on their car. Dave reluctantly revealed that there wasn't 'another woman' like she suspected - just fields and fields of strange symbols he and Doug had created in crop fields across the county. She went to the papers and the rest is history.

Yet despite Dave Chorley's confession, crop circles continue to appear and people continue to believe that there are extraterrestial origins behind them. But who can really blame them?

When Tina and discovered 'our' local crop circle, we were filled with excitement and enthusiasm. While some student of Chorley and Bowers is probably responsible for it, Tina and I still found it fun to believe - even if only for a second - that this one is linked to something slightly more mysterious.