Boreham Wood crop circle, Lockeridge

I don't think I will ever forget visiting this formation, and it will always be a personal favourite. I didn't really know what to expect as I walked up the tramline. Marvin had gone on ahead and I had this moment entirely to myself. As I came up towards the outer ring of the circle I suddenly felt a swirling rush in my stomach and a tremendous feeling of euphoria. Elation and joy and an overwhelming sense of wonder which took the breath out of me. There was a perfect ribbon of flattened crop stretching along at my feet from right to left, with a blue-green sheen which contrasted with the yellow-green heads of the standing crop. It made me laugh out loud and for a moment I thought I was going to cry as well. It was very intense, and the whirling in my stomach was tangibly physical. I could feel it for the first ten or fifteen minutes that I was inside the formation. As I walked around it I thought I could feel different impressions in different bits of it. The great rush of euphoria came from the very outer ring, and it was slightly calmer once I'd got into the main part of the formation, in the ring which surrounds the seven petals – more of a general sense of benevolence. And then the inner ring, around the cube emblem, had more of a sedate feel to it.

This was the 3rd July and at that time the circle was still quite fresh, only a couple of days old. At that stage of the season the wheat is still green and pliable, which makes the lines of the formation very clean and neat, and the laid crop lies very flat. It was beautiful in every way, and the stems of the wheat still had their natural whitish bloom which gave the laid areas a silvery shimmer when the sun finally came out.

The design of this crop circle is all sixes and sevens. Two circular bands of standing wheat surround a seven-pointed geometric 'flower' which looks a bit like the aperture in a camera lens, in the way the leaves or petals are overlapped. Camera lenses are designed with overlapping blades because it's the simplest mechanical way for a circular hole to be opened and closed in a controlled way, and when I look at this crop circle I find it easy to imagine it as an aperture which can step down or open up to reveal more of what's on the other side. (Incidentally there's no standard number of blades inside a camera lens but seven is pretty common.) Inside the aperture is another circle containing a hexagon divided into thirds, which can be taken as an isometric cube if you want to see it that way. As I said, I felt the vibes to be a bit different in the middle bit of the formation, but it wasn't until I tried drawing my own version of it that it was brought home to me how very different these areas really were. Sevenfold and sixfold geometry are incompatible and I had to make a completely separate set of measurements for each element, making two lots of pencil marks on the paper which bore no relation to each other.

There are symbolic things underlying the geometry too. Sixfold geometry is very ordered and balanced, and has a certain beauty and perfection of form. A lot of crystalline structures have it: quartz crystals form six-sided points and so do ice crystals, which is why snowflakes always have six points, an outer expression of their hexagonal molecular structure. To divide a circle into six equal parts you mark it out at 60° intervals, which is nice and easy to do (360° in a circle, divided by 6, gives you 60°). Sevenfold geometry is a whole different matter. Divide 360 by 7 and you get an impossible number, 51.428571428571...etc. Try measuring 51.428571428571° with a plastic protractor on a sheet of paper ... yeah right. For that matter, try measuring 51.42857142871° on the surface of a sloping field full of ripening wheat – that must have been fun for the circlemakers. Fortunately the human eye is not equipped to see that level of accuracy, so when I draw this design on paper I aim for angles of roughly 51 and a half degrees and that looks quite good enough at this scale. But the fact that a circle is nigh on impossible to measure accurately into seven equal parts does give it some symbolic significance. It's an elusive number, set apart from the rest. From a sacred geometry point of view you can look upon a seven-pointed or seven-sided figure as one which never quite manifests itself fully on this plane, and won't blend or align with any other number. So one way of looking at the Boreham Wood crop circle design is as a viewing hole through which you can observe something on a different plane: the seven-sided aperture providing a glimpse of a more orderly six-sided place beyond.

I'm not necessarily suggesting that's what the circle designer intended us to see in it. The only view I have about the purpose of crop formations is that they're meant to stimulate the imagination. And that's how this one has stimulated mine. Yours may be different. See in it what you will!

Drawing the seven-pointed 'flower'. After measuring out the circle into seven equal(-ish) parts, you set the compass to a distance two points apart, as shown. From this position, swing an arc across the circle and it will meet up on the other side with another point, but THREE points apart rather than two. I find this endlessly fascinating and wonderful. Drawing this arc from each of the seven points around the circle is what gives you the 'flower' figure.

A couple of things which are worth mentioning about the design. One is that the tips of the seven 'petals' don't go right to the edge of the circle they're in – there is a gap all the way around it. On the ground you can see it clearly because there is a ring of laid crop all the way around, forming a path. Because of this there is enough of a gap at the point of each petal to enable you to move from one section to the next. If the points of the petals touched the inside edge of the circle, you wouldn't be able to get through. The same is true of the inner circle with its hexagon design; a ring of laid crop around the outside of the hexagon allows you to walk freely around it. These are what Michael Glickman calls hospitality portals and seem to be common to most formations, supporting the idea that they are designed to be walked around on the ground as well as viewed from above.

One of the 'hospitality portals' around the central hexagon – just the right size to allow you to walk around freely.

Another thing is that the design doesn't have an obvious "right way up". There is a point at which the tip of one of the seven petals lines up with one corner of the central hexagon – but only one, because the sixfold and sevenfold geometry don't fit together. Maybe this one alignment point is significant. What else does it align with in the landscape? Nothing obvious, except possibly one of the tumuli on Overton Down a few miles away, but to be honest there are so many ancient sites around this area it's bound to align with something somewhere! The other points on the hexagon also form possible alignments with landscape features, such as the one below, where one of the three central paths aligns with the edge of the woods on top of a nearby ridge to the north-west, and if followed beyond that (on a map) appears to line up with West Kennett long barrow, though I have no way of checking that. There may or may not be any significance in any of these alignments.

But certainly this crop circle doesn't align in any obvious way with the field it's in. The tramlines cut through it at a seemingly random angle. Nor does it align in an obvious way with its own miniature satellite circle, which sits at the bottom edge of the same field. Indeed this tiny circle doesn't seem to have had a lot of attention, but it is a fascinating little thing.

When Marvin and I arrived at the field, on the early afternoon of 3rd July, we almost walked straight past the little satellite circle. It was only a few feet in diameter, very subtle and unassuming, a simple design of one plain circle and two outer rings, which occupied an unobtrusive spot between the bottom tramline and the hedge. We had seen it in aerial photos and were intrigued by it, because it was isolated in a patch of standing crop with no tramline going directly to it and it was very delicately imprinted into the surface of the crop – not fully flattened. Very possibly it was placed there some while before the main formation, and had started to grow out. I don't know. But anyway, when we visited there was a path trodden through by previous visitors, and the circle was no longer isolated. So in we went, and we both had a sense that it looked slightly different from what we were expecting, but neither of us twigged why. It was only when I got home and compared my own photos to some aerial pictures taken 48 hours earlier that I saw how different it looked. It wasn't lightly pressed when we visited it, it was fully flattened.

The little satellite circle and its swirled nest.

The most obvious explanation is that it got flattened by visitors' feet. It was clear that plenty of people had walked around in it, and the floor lay was chaotic and trampled. But not all of it. There was a neatly formed 'nest' in the centre, with an anticlockwise swirl around the outside of it. This is the thing that intrigues me, because it's not like that on the early aerial photos. The centre has a slight bobble, but not a swirled nest. Indeed the crop is all standing upright in those early photos and not swirled at all. Don't ask me what's going on with all that – I'm just explaining what I saw.

It was in this small satellite circle that I got out the dowsing rod I'd brought with me, because I'd never dowsed a crop circle before and I wanted to know whether there was any telluric activity in it. There was. I didn't get any responses while walking around the circle but over the patch of bare earth in the centre of the nest I got a decisive upward 'positive' reaction. Much like the energy nodes I find at ancient sites. I also got a 'negative' downward reaction at the very edge of it on the north-west side which I took at the time to be a water response. In hindsight I'm not so sure that's what it was, but I wasn't doing any kind of systematic survey at this point, just casually exploring.

I decided against dowsing in the two outer rings, because they were so fine and delicate it wouldn't have been possible for me to walk around them without damaging them.

The outer ring around the satellite circle, with its path too narrow to tread.

I did a little bit of dowsing in the main formation as well, but as I hadn't dowsed a crop circle before and didn't know what to expect, I was a bit unsure where to start. The main thing I found though was that the very centre of the formation, where the three paths meet, had an energy node which gave me a downward 'negative' response – the opposite of what I got in the small satellite circle. I noticed that the crop had been laid from the centre outwards along these three paths – all three of them had the heads of the wheat pointing away from the centre.

The centre of the main formation, which dowsed negative. The area in the centre is slightly messed up by trampling feet and the bums of those who sat down here to meditate, but you can still see the general pattern.

We spent quite a bit of time looking at the sections of laid crop around the seven-pointed flower. These were beautiful, and consisted of large areas which were partly swirled and partly folded, all subtly different. They also each had a lovely little tuft of upright wheat left standing, generally at the origin point of a swirl. But they weren't in the centres – they were over to one side of each segment, the left-hand side if you stood looking towards the middle of the formation – except one, which was on the right-hand side. Make of that what you will!

Marvin noticed another curious detail: most of the tufts had a single stem of wheat wrapped around the rest of the bunch and tied in a little knot. We have no idea how that came about.

The sideways lay of the wheat in one of the seven segments. It almost looks like waves breaking on a shore.

A swirl with a tuft in the middle.

This sheaf is held together with a single stalk wrapped around it – you can just see the horizontal wheat ear at the point where it's been tied.

Another tufted swirl.

And a tuft shown in context, looking towards the middle of the formation

The arc lines defining the separate 'petals' were really fine – too narrow to walk along, as shown here.

One thing I will remember most about this formation is how hard it was to leave it – it had such a beautiful benevolent atmosphere, I wanted to stay there forever. On the other hand, I have since met somebody who visited it and thought it had a horrible atmosphere, so I guess these things are pretty subjective!

At the end of our visit while we were chatting by the car, a red helicopter turned up and started flying around over the formation. I'm fairly sure it was Steve and Karen Alexander, on a photo mission. I'm a great admirer of their work and Karen often posts hints and tips on their website about how to draw the formations, which I find enormously helpful.