Cream of the crops
Are crop circles the work of aliens, or an opportunity for human beings to make their mark on nature? We head to Wiltshire with a very specific design in mind...
It’s one of those spectacular midsummer evenings. As the sun creeps down towards the horizon, we turn off the road onto a narrow track that climbs over a gentle hill between two high hedgerows. The fields ahead are ready for harvest and the landscape is draped in a thick yellow blanket of plump wheat heads, swaying softly in the warm breeze. Orange light obscures our vision and dust swirls around us like golden mist.
‘Watch out for the pothole,’ someone shouts suddenly from the back seat, breaking our reverie. But it’s too late, we’re already upon it. Everyone braces themselves, but instead of feeling the crash of the chassis and a jerk of the wheel, there’s barely a bump. Thanks to an additional 34mm ride height over the standard A4 Avant, the new Audi A4 allroad quattro rides over the deep rut as if it wasn’t there. And the car’s Comfort Dynamic Suspension has made our 100-mile journey down from London painless – despite the fact there are five adults on board, as well as loads of luggage.
However, this isn’t just a trip to rural Wiltshire to test out the vehicle – we’re here to make a crop circle with our team of experts. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, these mysterious patterns became headline news when they started to appear in farmers’ fields overnight. Some UFO enthusiasts proclaimed them as the work of little green men, but many farmers bemoaned them as the work of artists trespassing on their land. In recent years, crop circles have mostly disappeared from the public eye. Have the extraterrestrial visitors tired of visiting Earth or have the human makers gone into retirement after the threat of facing charges of criminal damage?
Helping us with our mission is Matthew Williams, a crop circle researcher and founder of Circlemakers TV. According to him, very few circle makers are still active. ‘Intricate crop circles are becoming quite a rare sight,’ he says. ‘But in the 1980s they captured the imagination of the era. There was something incredibly powerful about these patterns, and every time one appeared, large crowds would turn up to see it.’
The circle maker community blossomed and soon hundreds of enthusiasts would head to fields up and down the country at night to carve their own designs into the landscape. But this level of success quickly became the activity’s downfall. Visitors coming to see crop circles were permanently damaging the harvest and littering the fields, creating hostility with farmers who called in the police. Matthew, like many makers, decided it was time to stop, but his passion didn’t die and he started documenting the movement instead.
Enthusiasts such as artist Julian Richardson, have continued making crop circles but they have branched out into other areas of land art, using sand and fallen leaves. For our project tonight, Julian is the creative lead and has sketched out a familiar design for us.
To be firmly on the side of the law we have gained permission from farmer Will Dickson, the owner of Wick Farm in Wiltshire, to use one of his wheat fields. He’s waiting by the gate to let us in, but that doesn’t make the loose ground and rocky ditch we need to clear any less formidable. Luckily the A4 allroad is equipped with Audi’s all-wheel-drive technology. In the blink of an eye driving force is distributed between all four wheels – if one wheel begins to slip, power is delivered to others with more traction. The car’s quattro system also features a new off-road mode for even greater control.
The light is fading fast as we park up, and the team unpack their equipment quickly from the boot. The 505-litre capacity was needed to transport 1.5 metre-long boards, large bags full of markers and tapes, as well as food and refreshments for the long night ahead. After assessing the terrain and going over the plans, Julian gives us all a briefing about how to navigate the field before leading us in single file through the wheat rows. ‘You have to be very careful not to damage the crop,’ he explains. ‘It will ruin the overall effect if the surrounding wheat is patchy and part trodden down. You want it to look as pristine as possible, so it looks like it could only have been accessed from the sky.’
Julian marks the centre of the artwork and places one of the team to act as the anchor – they must hold the end of the measuring tape to their chest and never let go. ‘Cookie cutter edges are the mark of an amateur,’ warns Julian before taking up the other end, pacing out lengths and placing circle-shaped markers at strategic points. He then flattens a thin line of wheat through the crops with his feet to sketch out an outline. The makers follow this guide with large wooden boards with rope handles. They place them on the ground and put all their weight down, flattening the wheat. ‘It doesn’t damage the crop,’ Julian says. ‘It simply flattens it. When the farmers come to harvest, all they need to do is lower the head of their combine harvester and push the crop back upright.’
They work through the night until the first spears of light appear over the distant hills. The design complete, everyone takes a step back to admire their work. From this vantage point it’s difficult to see if we’ve been successful, but Julian looks quietly confident. The only way to know for sure is to send a drone with a camera up into the air, and we crowd around the screen that shows us what the camera sees.
As the drone ascends, the image reveals the thick hedgerow surrounding the field, then it rises some more and the four thick rings of the Audi logo finally appear, perfectly formed, surrounded by a field of amber. ‘This is the part I always miss,’ says Julian, with a big grin on his face. ‘Circle makers normally leave before sunrise so nobody knows we’ve done the work. The real fun is waiting to see what explanations people come up with. Sometimes they can be pretty far-fetched, but even then there’s no point in telling people otherwise. If someone’s convinced that crop circles can only be made by aliens, they’re not really going to listen to much reason are they?'
