Shaw Hill, nr Ludgershall, Wilts. 

Detail & Location: This circle was reported on the 14th of June. It was in a field of Barley and measured approximately 210ft in diameter. Sadly it was cut-out by the farmer on the morning of the 15th of June. See the Google Maps link for precise location. 

Crop Circle Reporting and Covid-19:  As in 2020, we will not be censoring crop circle locations during the continuing Covid-19 pandemic. We consider the reporting of crop circles to be in the spirit of journalism, and censorship to be an anathema to that spirit. Therefore, we will be treating the crop circle community as adults and asking everyone to approach the information carefully and responsibly. This will include not visiting the circles if the farmer has not given explicit permission to do so and should permission be given adhering to any covid restrictions in place. 

Flying during the Covid-19 Pandemic: The UK is coming out of covid restrictions in the UK during the early summer of 2021. However, the  restrictions of the past year have had a heavy impact on the aviation industry. Flying will continue to be very challenging for us this year, with access to aircraft and pilots still very restricted. We will continue to cover the season, flying where we can, while continuing to work photographer colleagues to bring you as much coverage as we can. We’d like to extend our deep gratitude to all those who generously share their images with us.

Visiting: This circle has now been cut by the farmer and there is nothing to visit. 

History & Connections: This crop circle lies close to the very pretty Ludgershall Castle. You can read more about the circle by visiting the English Heritage website here. 

From the English Heritage website:

Probably begun in the late 11th century by a sheriff of Wiltshire, Ludgershall was much improved in the 13th century by King John and his son Henry III, who used the castle as a hunting lodge. Three large walls and extensive earthworks survive, while in the centre of the nearby village are the remains of a 14th-century cross.
Read more about the history of the castle and cross.

Design & Symbolism: This was a lovely seven-fold formation, which I’m very much looking forward to drawing. See the Geometry Gallery below for updates as we have them. 

Visiting the Circles? If you are thinking of visiting any crop circles this summer, please read our Visiting the Crop Circles section. It’s full of useful information and etiquette for visiting the countryside and the crop circles. Please remember that you should not enter any fields without the express permission of the farmer and you will need to be aware of and abide by any restrictions in place in the UK in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Click here for Copyright Information about the reproduction of images on this website.

Please Help to keep us Flying in 2021: If you have enjoyed looking at our pictures and information please consider making a small donation to keep us flying. There are so few of us left regularly recording the circles it’s really important that we continue. And while some now use drones to record the circles, it is important that there are still images taken from aircraft where the best quality camera equipment can be used and images that include the broad vista of the landscape can be taken. This kind of photography is expensive and it gets harder with each passing year to raise the funds we need to continue our work, but if everyone who regularly looked at this website made a small donation we would meet the funds we need. You can make a donation here.

NOTE: Some of the images below are beautiful landscape scenes. Click on each image to enlarge them and see the whole picture.

IMPORTANT THANKS: to Hampshire Flyer for allowing us to use his images on our website. 

Image Licencing

We can supply high resolution images of many of our photographs and the sky is the limit as to what they can be used for! Choose from our extensive library or contact us to commission aerial photography for your project.

Find out more

Geometry Gallery

The Magnificent Seven 

Ludgershall 2021

by Karen Alexander 

The Flower of Spirit

Symbol of the World Soul
In his magnus opus ‘How The World is Made’, John Michell calls the number seven ‘The Holy Seven - Symbol of the World Soul’. This gives you some idea of the special nature of the number seven. 

In the crop circle world too, researcher Michael Glickman also held the number seven in high regard, next to the number five, it was a number he was always was pleased to see and one he venerated very much.

I’ve written many times about the number seven on this website, so I thought this time I could look at some lesser known properties of the number seven, what makes it so special and why we should always pay attention when it appears. 

Unlike many other numbers, seven is not widely found in nature. This is also true of the crop circle world. It was not until the summer of 1998 that we had our first seven-fold circle, and its appearance was actually predicted by Michael Glickman the year before, as part of the unfolding of number in the crop circle forms. 

For just about anyone who has sat through a crop circle geometry lecture you may have heard another John Michell quote ‘Seven is the number of Spirit, revelation, the eternal feminine and what lies behind the veil’. Encapsulated in this typically expressive Michellian-quote are some key properties of seven; its link with spirit, the feminine and more deeply the revelations of the hidden sacred feminine. 

There are a few seven-petalled flowers in nature, but not many. Interestingly, it is found in the cannabis leaf - and I think that’s rather telling. Seven is a number of spirit and revelation - need I say more?

The link between seven and the ephemeral, or the subtle realms of spirit and nature are also well known - the notes in the musical scale, the colours of the light spectrum, the chakras, the seven sisters of the Pleiades, the seven visible planets and the seven alchemical metals. There are many more.*

Lucky Seven?
While seven is a number considered to be lucky in many cultures, it was not to be for this crop circle, as it was cut from the field by the farmer, just a day after it was widely reported on the internet. It’s a true shame, I guess the farmer did not know what a special circle he had on his hands. 

This particular crop circle contains four nested seven-pointed stars - four iterations of seven. The particular seven-pointed star (or heptagram) used in this design is called an obtuse heptagram (also called a fat heptagram), in contrast to the acute (thin) heptagram which has much finer arms.

Division of a circle by 7 - 99.79% accuracy

Division by Seven
The first difficulty with seven is that you cannot divide the 360 degrees of the circle into seven equal parts, or pizza slices (as Michael would say), you are left with a stringy pieces of cheese that go on forever! Division by seven gives us 51.42857… For the eagle-eyed among you, you may realise that this is very close to the slope of the Great Pyramid which has been ‘approximated’ to 51.5º - so each one of the triangles in this crop circle are very close indeed to the proportions of the Great Pyramid. 

There are several ways to divide a circle into seven using a compass and straight edge. The one in the image uses division by six, then a tangent curve to locate 1/7th of a circle, it’s 99.79% accurate, which is very good indeed, but it’s not perfect. 

The creation of the nested heptagrams is entirely self-generating  - once you have drawn the first, the rest just sit inside each other, as with all geometry though, with each iteration you introduce another layer of compound error. 

This is the way that things work in the material world, as opposed to the abstract world of ideas and principles. Matter ‘costs’, even in the crop circles. As the circles appear in the material world, they are as subject to this concept as much as anything else. 

The two heptagram stars

The Sign of Four 
Four iterations of 7 give us the number 28. Which is a neat segway into discussing time. Seven has an interesting relationship to time. There are 7 days in the week and 28 days in the average month, it is often linked to lunar time because it is the average duration of the lunar month - also because it is the average days in the human menstrual cycle. The link between 7 and the eternal feminine now becomes clearer. The mythology of the seventh day should also be mentioned here because it makes the link between time and the spirit clearer - six days to create the world, but the seventh day (the sabbath) was reserved for the Divine. This link between Time and the Divine, or the divine nature of time is also part of the meaning of seven. Finally, according to Hippocrates there are seven ages of mankind: child, boy, adolescent, youth, man, elder and old man. It is also thought that the soul enters the foetus at 49 weeks (7x7). 

Seven Alone
Seven is sometimes known as the virgin because it does not interact with other numbers easily and it is not born from the Vesica Pisces - as all other numbers in the Decad are. Both these behaviours or characteristics set seven apart - it stands alone. This in addition to the connection between seven and the subtle nature of material world, gives it a distinctly spiritual flavour, something of this world, but not quite in it either. 

Seven, Four and Eleven
The geometry of this crop circle marries the number 7 with 4. Four is the cornerstone of the material world, it is matter and mother substance. The marriage of these two numbers could be said to speak of the concretisation of the divine feminine in our world - to fix the volatile nature of her spirit. Seven plus four equals eleven - the number associated with contact with other dimensions - yet another subtle weaving in this tapestry of number.

The Golden Circle

Golden Circle
This formation is completed by adding a containing standing ring which holds the whole composition together. This ring is in a golden section relationship with the innermost heptagram (see illustration), this gives this circle a living presence - almost like the auras seen in religious paintings. This is an analogy only folks - I do not see the crop circle phenomenon as ‘religious’ - but it does wear its spirituality on its sleeve. The link between the spiritual and the so-called paranormal is a long one, the two are intertwined no matter now much our rational minds might like it not to be so. 

In the whole
This was a fabulous crop circle, incredibly powerful and thought provoking. It spoke of the revelatory nature of the crop circle phenomenon, its grounding in the material world, and yet there is part of it that lies beyond our reality. It spoke of the nature of the feminine soul of the world and its crucial role in the process of emerging new paradigms. Despite its straight lines and angles, there was something other worldly about 4 iterations of 7 encompassed by a golden circle. 

Please enjoy the images in the gallery below...

Further Thoughts by Peter van den Burg - please see his images in the gallery below...

The inner- and outer radius of the ring of the formation is a Squared circle with equal area.

Thanks/Credits:
I would like to thank some of my crop circle cognoscenti for their help in forming these ideas: Steve Alexander, Peter van den Burg, Jineen Cronin and Jonathan-Paul DeVierville.

With special thanks to Peter van den Burg for his thoughts, perspectives and analysis. You can see more of his great work on his Facebook page Geometry of the crop circles.

Golden Section Proportioners by Scott Onstott.