Field Report Combe Hill recorded 30th
July, visited 31st July
This formation is in a stunning
location on the edge of Salisbury Plain, looking north over the Avon
Valley with Bradford and Bath to the left, Bratton and Trowbridge in
front and Devizes to the right. It can be accessed by lanes and drivable
by-ways from Westbury, Bratton or the Westbury White Horse direction,
and all roads lead you past the huge Iron Age enclosure known as Bratton
Camp, within which is a much earlier Neolithic long barrow. There's a
big car park there and you can also continue east along the Ridgeway to
find the crop circle in the third field on the left after the former
White Horse Farm on the corner. To the south of the Ridgeway starts the
Ministry of Defense land, as marked on the OS map and with warnings on
firing practice clearly signed along the trackside. The Ridgeway itself
is open to all traffic here, there are places to park alongside which
allow room for passing farm machinery and there are numerous public
paths criss-crossing the edge of the plain and down the escarpment to
Bratton village: lovely walks for a sunny day!
In the valley below is the airfield of
RAF Keevil which is now run by Joint Helicopter Command, whose
activities will be familiar to regular crop circle visitors as far north
as the Pewsey Vale and the Milk Hill area. However the airfield is also
host to model aircraft flying and a glider club, so there are plenty of
people who could have seen the formation as their planes caught the
thermals up onto the plain.
Keen observers will know that Bratton
Camp has attracted crop circles several times before, notably in 1990,
2007, 2010 and 2019, but they have never before appeared in the field in
question or its immediate neighbors. The reason for this was apparent on
entering the field. The patch of green visible just below the formation
on some of the drone photos turned out to be a large stand of nettles
around a galvanized cattle trough still supplied with water and perhaps
leaking slightly. This was apparently pasture land until recently. It
now carries a heavy crop of short-stalked wheat which is ripe and ready
to harvest as soon as it can get enough sun to dry out properly.
It was raining lightly during our visit
but there was no mud in the field on this thin chalky soil favoured by
the circlemakers. It was easy to go in at the corner gateway without
damaging any crop and to walk along to the fifth tramline down before
heading north across the field. Sadly two car-loads who followed us in,
and saw us carefully exiting along the perimeter tramline, nevertheless
charged straight through the crop. No wonder access gets closed down...
Five tramlines pass through the formation, making the total size of the
pentagonal pattern about 140m across (assuming a 24m tramline
separation). It is highly symmetrical, with little variation between the
lay in different parts: nice and flowing throughout the 5 'spiraling'
arms (which are actually all halves of circles) and 5 evenly spaced
concentric rings, with surprisingly little compression considering the
stage of growth. I failed to measure these pathways but they were wide
and spacious, maybe 2m across. The 'arms', the outer ring from which
these emerge and the next ring in are all laid clockwise, the third ring
is anti-clockwise, the fourth clockwise, the fifth anti-clockwise and
it's back to clockwise for the inner circle. The crop was still quite
springy where not already walked on; I seem to remember laid wheat being
a lot more flattened when this close to harvest time back in the day,
and I wonder if this is due to a lighter application of the
circle-making force or perhaps to yields being higher and the crop more
bulky.
In the 5 three-quarter circles marking
the corners of the pentagon and in the central inner circle, the lay was
softer and looked messy with plenty of stalks still standing, apparently
at random. However from the one usable aerial shot we have so far, it
was clear that there was a 'combed' pattern going on here, with the laid
crop concentrated in circular rows which are again concentric
throughout, not spiral. As always it would have been wonderful to have
some sharply focused and high-res overhead photos showing the details of
this, which were very hard to discern on the ground. Near the centers of
all the outer circles was an elaborate feature involving multiple layers
both swirled and straight, with in a couple of cases the remains of a
small standing tuft at the very center of the lay (although as usual,
not at the geometrical center of the circles). Perhaps these were
originally in all the circles, before the corn was battered by wind and
rain. We suspected that the formation may not have been immediately
discovered despite its proximity to the the airfield and it may have
been there already for several days while no-one was flying due to the
bad weather.
I noticed that the tramline tracks were
unusually wide in this field (i.e. made by a wider tractor tire). At the
same time, picking up on a topic from previous reports, the strips of
unflatten crop stalks along their edges in otherwise laid areas were
substantial and included mature as well as green stalks. What is more,
when I tested by hand (admittedly only three stalks), they flattened
easily and did not spring back up, so they were never laid.
This was a very impressive formation
which gave us a sense of peace and somehow reminded me of T.S. Eliot's
Burnt Norton:
At the still point of the turning
world, neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the
still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And
do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither
movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the
point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only
the dance.
Gramail
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