The Longbarrow at All Cannings, Wiltshire.

(Reported elsewhere as Clifford’s Hill, or Allington, Wilts.)

Details: This circle was reported late in the day on Saturday the 21st of July. It is located by the road that runs from Honey Street in Alton Barnes to Horton, at a bend in the road close to Clifford’s Hill, the Village of Allington and the site of the Longbarrow at All Cannings – so take your pick! You can see its precise location on the google maps link on this page. The formation measured approximately 180-200ft in diameter and was a 12-pointed spinner design in wheat.

Visiting – This crop circle has now been harvested.

Grateful Thanks: Our grateful thanks go to the photographer Nils Kenneth Fordal who very kindly offered us some of his lovely pictures for our website – when he knew we had been unable to photograph this circle before the farmer had defaced it. Thanks Nils for your kindness. The circle was reported on the evening of the 21st, by lunch time of the 22nd it had been cut.

Location: This is is a lovely part of Wiltshire that through the years has been visited by the crop circle phenomenon many times. In recent years however, many of the circles appearing here have been cut from the fields by farmers in an attempt to discourage circles happening there. Clifford’s Hill is part of the Marlborough Downs and both the nearby villages of All Cannings and Allington lie in the shadow of these majestic undulating hills, there is a real atmosphere to this place that is hard to describe. Also nearby is the Long Barrow at All Cannings, definitely worth a mention because of it’s highly unusual nature and beauty. Unlike the many barrows in this area, this barrow is different because it is a modern construction, it was built in 2014 as a spiritual place, a columbarium or place for cremated remains in urns to be kept. You can read more about the barrow here and see pictures of its amazing and serenely beautiful interior.

Design & Symbolism: Like the circle at Kingweston in Somerset this was a 12-fold design; a kind of windmill-like central flower is contained by a standing and flattened circle. It has a real grace to it which is hard to describe. It reminded me of the kind of hand-held windmill I had as a child, and in that reverie it struck me that the wind, breath and time are somehow all linked.

(From the Kingweston page) 12 is a number that is intimately woven into our culture in all kinds of ways. It symbolises totality and (like the number 1) a sense of wholeness. Its relationship with time is obvious; our days and nights are divided into 12 hours each, our year has twelve months, the heavens are divided into twelve constellations (Zodiac), but then we also have groupings of 12 – the 12 disciples, the 12 tribes of Israel, and then there are 12 labours of Hercules and the 12 major and minor notes that make up the ‘whole’ musical scale. There is a sense of wholeness and competition to all of these expressions of 12 and perhaps this is why 12-fold patterns are so satisfying to look at. See the Geometry Gallery below for more information about this particular pattern.

Come and meet us at our annual conference August 3rd – 5th in Devizes Wiltshire. We have three days of workshops and lectures – it’s a great place to immerse yourself in the subject and meet like-minded people! See here for more details.

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.

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Please Help to keep us Flying in 2018: 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.

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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.

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Geometry Gallery

Here the 360 degrees of the circle are divided in to 24 to create the 12 sails or blades of the windmill. The compass point is placed at the points in-between each of the 12 blades to create the arc (hence the need to divide into 24) – and the radius for the arcs are from the sail point to the opposite side of the central circle. The centre of this formation is a bit of a mystery – in the exact way the sails are cut off as they circle the central ring – but my drawings below give a good approximation as is possible with a compass and straight edge. All in all, this is a lovely crop circle and it has been a pleasure to draw.