Fig 1. The First Wiltshire formation of the Year at The Ridgeway

There had been the first dusting of rape blossom yellow in the fields for the past week or so but the crop, or at least the crop that I had seen, appeared a little low. I hoped we might get a formation by the end of the month.

Yet here we are. On the 14th of April on the Ridgeway the first formation was discovered, as expected in oil-seed rape. Historically, rape has not been the most obedient medium for the circle designers. While barley and wheat grow in an orderly and close-packed manner, each individual rape plant (which is taller and bulkier) seems stridently to assert its own uniqueness. Rape is not a compliant medium and its thick celery-like stalks are resistant to any attempt to manipulate them.


Fig 2. Ridgeway Blossoms – by Roy Leraand

Yet, despite this, since the early ‘90s we have received a catalogue of increasingly elaborate early-season rape formations and Ridgeway is one of the more remarkable ones. The Oliver’s Castle globe of 2007, Karen reminds me, was another. Is there a possibility that, just as we are on a learning curve with the circles, the circlemakers themselves are getting better at it? I recall rape formations of the early ‘90s which seemed unremarkable and messy.

At Ridgeway, within a large flattened circle there are four relatively thin, equally spaced, standing concentric rings. Each ring is bracketed by a pair of arcs. Each arc is a quarter of a ring and is more than twice the thickness of the original four.

Fig 3. The Ridgeway arcs – by Roy Leraand

I fear I bore all who read me or hear me with my obsession with the Squaring of the Circle.  It seems to be such a consistent feature of the circles’ programme that I am sure it is a signpost for us.  

The Sacred Geometer took the square as the symbol of the material world and the circle as the symbol of heaven. The geometric exercise, the Squaring of the Circle, served as a metaphor for a bridge between matter and spirit, the marriage of heaven and earth. Now, this seems like a good idea to me and, boy, do we need it now.

I have felt since the ‘90s that many of the crop circles were referring (among many other things) to this idea and the consistency of those references has been impressive. Thus, when I first saw Ridgeway, I recognised the same motif.

The diagram shows that by connecting the inner four points of the opposing pairs of arcs a square is formed. The eight arcs could be seen as the framework on which four squares could be placed.


Fig 4. The Ridgeway formation & Squaring the Circle - by M. Glickman

The circle can be squared either by area (where the area of the square equals the area of the circle) or by perimeter (where the lengths of the four sides of the square equal the circumference of the circle). The ancient Greeks favoured the area method but more recently the perimeter method has been used more widely. In crop circles the most important work on Squaring the Circle has been done by Allan Brown who demonstrated that the majority of historic quintuplet and celtic cross formations complied meticulously. Most of his work was based by the measured perimeter method and I used this to check Ridgeway.

The central of the four circle/squares was a long way off but when checked for area it showed an accuracy of 96%. On the diagram then, the area of the red square is (approximately) equal to the area of the pink circle. I must admit I was disappointed by the imprecision of this result!

I have always argued that the phrase “squaring the circle” metaphorically suggested that spirit (the circle) was to become more earthly (more square). Surely circling the square, or moving the world towards the divine is more optimistic.

However mathematically inaccurate Ridgeway might be, it showed us sets of circles and squares. Perhaps the fundamental lesson of the phenomenon is that it scatters heavenly circles into our square and material fields.

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I lost my temper over the careless handling of some images in my last posting (“Upside Down 18th March”).  Several people contacted me pointing out that crop circles have no “up”. They are perfect every way.

It is evident that I did not make myself clear. I was moaning because the photographs, the images, were upside down. Crop circles inhabit a rather blurred hinterland between the two- and the three-dimensional. They are two-dimensional diagrams moved into our third-dimensional reality in the crop fields. When they are photographed, that image takes on an independent integrity of its own. It has solidity, shadow and - emphasised by the tramlines - it has perspective. My argument was that it was sloppy, careless and disrespectful to show a clearly upside-down image, let alone eight upside-down images.

When Steve Alexander flew over the Chilbolton Face of 2001 he did not know (nobody knew) that it was a face. The first photograph was taken from the top and the print had to be turned upside-down to see the face. This clearly was a crop circle with a top and a bottom. I would argue that several other formations, by virtue of their compliance with north, have tops and bottoms. The 1991 Barbury Castle triangle was positioned to point north and the strange little six-petalled flower of 1998 at Waden Hill had a single, significantly smaller, petal directly at magnetic north. The beautiful Bythorn five-pointed star was very specifically upside down. The star pointed directly south, which is, as the circle authors clearly know, unusual in our culture. To emphasise the point the second five-pointed star, at Bishops Cannings in 1997, was also positioned to point down or to the south.

We could discuss ad infinitum whether or not formations have a right way up. Photographs however are either right or wrong. To publish them upside down is at best careless and at worst offensive.

MG