Longwood Warren, Hampshire.

(Nr. Winchester) 

Detail & Location: This circle was reported on the 29th of June. It is in a field of green wheat and measures approximately 200ft in diameter. See the Google Maps link for precise location. It is the most complex formation of the 2020 season so far.

Update: Finally on the 20th of July, we were able to take to the skies for the first time in 2020 after lockdown restriction were eased somewhat in the UK. Please enjoy the pictures we were able to take of this formation three weeks after its arrival. The barley crop had now matured into a golden brown, but the crop circle was still holding up pretty well and apart from a slight softening on the edges, looked clean and crisp in the field. This circle may not last too much longer, the harvesters are now starting to bring the barley in!

Crop Circle Reporting and Covid-19: After considerable thought and consultation, we have decided we will not be censoring crop circle locations during the Covid-19 pandemic. There are no current restrictions in place in the UK that call for a blanket ban on visiting the countryside. 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 that they practice social distancing by staying 2 metres away from fellow visitors. It would be our very strong advice that visiting the crop circles on the ground should be kept to an absolute minimum for now. However, because we know that the location of any given circle can be important to researchers and those that record the circles from the air, we will continue to share what we know. 

Flying during the Covid-19 Pandemic: As yet, because of the current pandemic, we have not been able to take to the air to record the crop circles as we usually would. We are however, very confident that the restrictions keeping us grounded at present will be lifted before too long and we will be able to cover the rest of the season as usual. In the meantime, we are every pleased to have teamed up with the excellent AEROBO (Art in Flight) who will be helping us collect images and drone footage of the latest crop circles to share on the website. 

Visiting: As far as we are aware no permission has been given to visit this crop circle. Please do not visit this circle. Thank you. 

History & Connections: Longwood Warren lies close to the Devil’s Punch Bowl at Cheesefoot Head, just outside of Winchester in Hampshire. This area has a very long association with the crop circle phenomenon, with circles appearing around this location since the late 1970s/early 1980s. Famously, Longwood Warren was home to the huge solar-system formation of 1995. The whole area is place of outstanding natural beauty, the Punch Bowl, once famous for its crop circles is now no longer planted with crops and is the location of the huge annual Boomtown Fair. A cursory glance at the OS map for the area will reveal several bowl barrows in the area, showing this has been a sacred site to humans for many thousands of years. 

Design & Symbolism: This is a beautiful formation based on an exquisite 5-fold geometry. The central pentagram and pentagon is surrounded by a series of fifteen overlapping rings – sublime! Can’t wait to get this in the drawing board! Check back later for updates. 

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. 

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Please Help to keep us Flying in 2019: 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.

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Geometry Gallery

The Longwood Fifteen
by Karen Alexander 2020

After the delights of the Ogbourne St. George crop circle of the 25th of June, this formation at Longwood Warren seems almost too much  - what a season we are having!

A Shift in tone?
After contemplating the mysterious 18 at Ogbourne, we have now been given a new number to contemplate - that of 15. I find this interesting; 2020 seems to be presenting us with some fascinating numbers, some that are not readily familiar to us, perhaps a shift in tone of some kind is occurring? 

Time will tell with what else the season brings.

Pivotal Pentagrams
It would be easy to look at the Longwood Warren circle and see it as a simple 5-fold design, with its beautiful and ever alluring pentagram in the centre. As crop circle enthusiasts 5 and the pentagram are devices we are familiar with, we have seen each used to incredible effect in many circles over the years. In fact the appearance of the pentagram in a series of formations from 1993 onwards has often been seen as pivotal; the tracing and tracking of the unfolding of 5 in the crop circle phenomenon has been a favourite esotericism for those in the crop circle community that have a special interest in number and ratio.

During the Winter/Spring of 2019/2020 I began an in depth study of several of these formations (the work is ongoing), so it peaks my interest at the moment when anything connected to this arrives. 

The 1993 Bythorn Mandala - diagram by Michael Glickman

Five
Before we move on to the number 15, it would be remiss not to discuss the number 5 and the pentagram a little further. The first crop circle  pentagram arrived in 1993 in the Bythorn Mandala, here the pentagram was traced out as a line-type shape. It was to be the summer of 1997 (five years later) we had our second pentagram at Bishops Cannings in Wiltshire. Researcher Michael Glickman who had done the most through analysis of the geometry of Bythorn lived not more than a mile or so away from Bishops Cannings. 

Five is the number of life, regeneration and the fecundity of nature. The pentagram is the generator of the Golden Section, that hallowed ratio which is founded in the proportions and growth patterns of all living things and then translated into sacred spaces – temples and churches. The pentagram star is almost as ubiquitous in human culture as the Divine circle itself, golden five-armed stars adorned the midnight-blue ceilings of the tombs of the Ancient Egyptian kings, and in modern times they are featured in company logos and many international  flags – even standing in place of the anonymous-fallen on the wall of the CIA building at Langley. Looking at their varied uses in our culture, it might be said that they represent ‘that to which we aspire’ and perhaps more deeply, the human spirit itself. 

Fifteen
Fifteen is a very different proposition. In the Longwood Warren crop circle, 15 is expressed in the petals that enclose the central portion of the design. Fifteen is of course 3 x 5 and we see this easily in the crop circle. The central pentagram is enclosed firstly by a pentagon and then a circle, there are 3 petal shapes on each side of the pentagon. All the petal shapes are made by a series of fifteen partially realised, intersecting rings. These rings give a toroid feel to the design, making it seem almost multidimensional. 

Albert Durer's 'Melancholia' (1514) features a magic square above the angel's head. Geometry and number were seen as the ideal underpinning of art - mirroring the natural world.

Magic Squares
So what of 15? Curiously enough 15 has a relationship with magic squares. The first recorded use of magic squares dates back to ancient China approximately 2800BC. Magic squares are grids of numbers arranged in such a way as to reveal special properties of number. In the famous 3 x 3 so-called ‘Square of Saturn’ the numbers 1-9 are placed in the grid so that each row, column and each horizontal adds up to15, with the number 5 occupying the centre of the grid. Connecting the numbers in this grid in order gives the ancient sigil used for the planet Saturn. Interestingly, when this formation appeared the planet Saturn was in close proximity to the Full Moon brilliantly visible in the night sky at the time!

The 'Saturn' Magical Square

Our ancestor's fascination with Magic Squares and other such playful applications of number perhaps comes from the fact these organisations of number seems to imply a connected, fundamental order to the cosmos, perhaps even that of a creator-mind at work - winking back at us.

The fifteen qualities of love
My favourite 15 is from the book The Quality of Numbers by Wolfgang Held and is thus:

St Pauls Letter to the Corinthians

Love is Patient and Kind (2)
Love is Not Jealous, or Boastful it is Not Arrogant or Rude (4)
Love does Not Insist on its Own Way; it is Not Irritable or Resentful (3)
It does Not Rejoice at Wrong, but Rejoices in the Right (2)
Love Bears All Things, Believes All Things, Hopes All Things, Endures All Things (4)

Total 15 

A beautiful and much needed reminder in these times of global uncertainty, sickness, loss, inequality and pain of the power of goodness, compassion and love.

Conclusions?
I am fascinated by the link between Saturn and the number fifteen in relation to this circle, as Saturn (with Jupiter) were visible close to the full moon in the nighttime sky when this formation occurred. What a view it would have made standing in this crop circle at night to see it! As I mentioned above, I am always interested when a pentagram appears as it is the number of life and the eternal human spirit and also because if its long association with the crop circle phenomenon. The pentagram also raises the question of the orientation of the design - should the pentagram be static or dynamic? I tend to think they should always be static (with two points on the plane rather than with just one). This seems to me to be the dignified way to orient the pentagram. I would be interested to know how it lined-up with the cardinal points on the compass - did it point north or south? Finally, I am further interested in the number 15 because it is not one we see in crop circles - in fact I cannot think of one (immediately) that has explicitly used this number before. 

Addendum.
After writing this I was reminded by Scott Onstott of the work of John Martineau on the geometry of the solar system. The relationship between Earth's mean diameter and orbit and that of Saturn are defined by a fifteen pointed star. Scott kindly sent this lovely illustration that shows the relationship and a further relationship to the Golden Section. Thanks Scott!

The Earth-Saturn relationship (after John Martineau) and Golden Section relationship. Image by Scott Onstott. Click on image to enlarge.

Further Reading 

The Quality of Numbers 1 - 31
Wolfgang Held
Floris Books 2012
ISBN 978-086315-864-3

For more reading on Magic Squares:
Islamic Patterns - An analytical and cosmological approach
Keith Critchlow 
Thames & Hudson 1976 (& repeated printings) 
ISBN 978-0-500-2707-1-4

A Mini-History of Magic Squares (weblink)

Thanks & Credits
As always, this article would not have been possible without the generous help of a handful of very important people. I would like to thank some of my crop circle cognoscenti for their help in forming these ideas.

Text | Hand-drawn Images by Karen Alexander.
With special thanks to Peter van de 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.
Diagram by Bertold Zugelder. 

Further Thoughts
by Peter van den Burg

Longwood Warren June 29, 2020

There are basicly two ways to make the arrangement of fifteen petals. Placing an equilateral triangle in the circle will trisect the pentagon precisely. Construct a circle that meets the vertice of the pentagon and let that go round fifteen times.
Another way, argueably cooler, is taken a circle with the inner radius of the pentagon and place that on each vertice and let that go round. This is not as accurate, but when done on paper will surely suffice.
The perimeter circle is two times the central circle.
In it's most essential form it is an instruction for a Squared circle based on two rings with pentagonal proportion.
The tramlines emphasize this. A Golden angle perpendicular to the tramlines crosses the perimeter circle at the lower tramline. This is often seen and may play a role in determining how big a formation is going to be.

See the Gallery Below for Peter's reconstructions