The Croppie wasn’t planning to post additional groundshots from the now farmer-defaced circle at Ludgershall, but sometimes photos and places can take on a deeper meaning.

It wasn’t a pleasant visit out to the edge of the Salisbury Plain military training area. It was hot and being extermely allergic to barley I was wrapped up in waterproofs, goggles, gloves and a mask. Wielding a camera I must have looked rather disturbing. It probably explains why the intrigued croppie I ran into didn’t stick around.

Black military helicopters seem to take great interest in the circle, coming in low and hovering over the formation. Weirdly, none of my photos of the helicopters came out. They were unrecoverable and corrupted.

Perhaps by coincidence an RAF transport plane also circled around, making the ground shake. Had I been looking for some peace I would have been out of luck.

Fifteen minutes was all I could manage inside the formation before the heat and my allergy became too much. I can never enjoy such a visit. It doesn’t matter that I love crop circles, I just cannot hang around in a field of barley.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the farmer chose to deface this silent, neat and inoffensive crop circles. Like so much else in the world its existence proved to be ephemeral. It is now another ghost of this most spectral of phenomena.

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