Quite the most impressive formation for many years has appeared at Milk Hill, Wiltshire, recalling a classic theme in a new and stunning way. Everyone staggers, boundaries crumble, belief envelopes tear.


On August 13th, a new crop design was discovered which has shaken many people to the core. Using a fractal style first pioneered at Stonehenge and then Windmill Hill in 1996, this six-armed spiral design is one of the largest and most elaborate glyphs ever to have appeared.

There are around 400 circles making up the design, covering a huge area ranging from 800’ to 1500’ depending on which report you read (exact measurements still awaited). Basically, it’s very, very big and aeroplanes and helicopters had to fly higher than usual for aerial photographers to take it all in. On the ground, its configuration is almost impossible to discern and appears simply as a maze of many-sized circles connected to each other with just a thin standing curtain of stems between, but from the air its true beauty and mind-blowing accuracy is revealed.

After a summer where some have felt the patterns rather subdued and the croppie world to be full of confusion and deliberately spread hoax paranoia, this appears to be a last-minute gift which will test even the most devout sceptic and perhaps pull back from the brink waverers who may have fallen victim to recent debunking propaganda and had brows furrowed by all sorts of man-made experiment-movie-demonstration efforts. It’s interesting how it almost knowingly picks up on visual themes still very popular with circle enthusiasts and which remain unclaimed by the Johnny Stomper-Rollers of the world to this day.

Even crop-cruncher John Lundberg, in the latest general e-mail from the ‘Circlemakers’ web site, is highly impressed, stating: “If this formation was man-made, allowing for time to get into and out of the field under cover of darkness the construction time left should be around four hours. Given that there are over 400 circles, some of which span approx 70ft in diameter, that would mean that one of those circles would need to be created every 30 seconds and that's not even allowing any time for the surveying, purely flattening, this formation pushes the envelope and that's a MASSIVE understatement... my brain hurts!”

So far the best that has been offered from more vociferous debunk-camps has been that there have been “rumours” about the new formation, which is as good as saying that they haven’t got a bloody clue what made it either, though doubtless some nonsense will be cranked up as soon as they can think of something to make themselves feel better.

The fractal design lies at the top of Milk Hill, on the downs themselves, rather than below, so there’s no place where it can really be appreciated from at a distance. One to fly or be hypnotised in by walking around it instead.

It’s hard to imagine something more impressive arriving before the season’s over, but there’s still a couple of weeks left before harvest…