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.

Dowsing the mound on Chosen Hill

I keep coming back to the little known and much underrated Chosen Hill (shown on maps as Churchdown Hill) between Gloucester and Cheltenham. It's one of my special places in my local area. And every time I come here I feel the same thing. An urge to do some dowsing!

The reason I've not done so before is that I didn't really know where to start. I don't have the time or resources to do a detailed survey, but there didn't seem much point in doing a half-hearted effort either. Besides which, Chosen Hill is a very popular place for dogwalkers and ramblers, and whenever anybody sees me swinging around a bent coathanger they invariably come and ask "whatcha doin'?" which is almost impossible to explain without sounding like a nutter.

But this week I went up there and gave it a go. I would love to hear from any other dowsers who have done any work up here, and whether they get results which are similar to or different from mine.

The church on top of its green mound.

That's some location for an old church.

First of all I should explain why this site is special, though the photos probably say all that needs to be said. The hill itself is an outlier to the Cotswolds and sits on its own – a 500ft high steep-sided lump sat in the middle of the Severn Vale. Perched on the north-eastern corner of the hilltop (which is not, incidentally, the highest point of the hill but it's pretty close) is the isolated medieval church of St Bartholomew, which was originally the parish church for the village of Churchdown, and a punishing trek up a steep slope for former parishioners. There is a newer church in the village now, but St Bartholomew's is still used for a handful of services and it's a remarkable place, full of historic curiosities, re-used carved stones from an earlier church, and images of dragons. It's also quite a landmark, visible from all around the local area, looking like a faery castle when the sun catches it in early evening.

The church is built on top of a steep-sided mound in the churchyard, which is a very striking feature, and suggests the place was sacred before the church (and its Saxon predecessor) was built. The mound has curious ridges or terraces around it, in a style which reminds me of Glastonbury Tor, albeit on a smaller scale. Some of these are visible in the churchyard, while others can be seen continuing some distance down the northern and eastern side of the hill, interrupted by field boundaries and clumps of trees but still visible if you make the effort to look. These lower ridges are on private property so it isn't possible to explore them close up, but they have intrigued me for a long time.

There is uncertainty as to whether the topographical features of the hill are natural or man-made, or both. Older maps show the whole hilltop as an Iron-Age camp; modern maps don't. I think it probably is an ancient camp because it has that sort of vibe and there have been finds of pottery fragments from that time period. Unfortunately the majority of the original enclosure has been destroyed by the construction of a set of covered reservoirs in the 20th century, but there are still some surviving earthen banks around the hilltop which look very much like ramparts.

It's the small green mound immediately underneath the church, however, which draws my attention the most.

Ridged pathways around the mound in the north-western corner of the churchyard, with a pedestrian gate at the bottom leading down towards the village.

The western end of the mound.

The southern side with old box tombs set into the slope of the mound.

The entrance on the northern side. I got a water reaction with my dowsing rods in the gateway instead of the usual 'entrance' response.

One of the things that intrigues me about the mound is that it has a direction of spin. I don't much like using the New Agey term 'earth energy', but I don't have another name for it and can't really explain what it is either, so I can only say that there is some kind of telluric flow which goes around the mound in either a clockwise or anticlockwise direction on different occasions. I feel this so strongly that I don't need dowsing rods to pick it up. Every time I visit the churchyard I immediately feel which direction the energy is spinning and feel obligated to walk around the churchyard in the direction of flow. It seems to switch over on some periodic cycle but I don't go up there often enough to know how often it changes. I can only say that it was flowing in a clockwise direction during my dowsing trip on the afternoon of 1st December, but on my previous visit two weeks earlier, on 17th November, it was going anticlockwise.

So even if I couldn't do a proper survey, I wanted to dowse the area of the churchyard and get a sense of what is there, hopefully to follow up any interesting discoveries later. My dowsing tool of choice is a V-rod, which is a metal or plastic version of the traditional forked stick divining rod. I also used angle rods to check my results afterwards and for those tasks which the V-rod doesn't excel at, such as directional pointers. To record the places where the rods reacted I used a handheld GPS to mark them as waypoints. This isn't perfect: the limitation of the technology is that it's only accurate to within a few feet, but for a job like this it's a lot better than faffing about with maps and measuring tapes. It was very cold and frosty on the hilltop on 1st December (most of the photos you see here were taken during previous visits when the weather was nicer) so I was hoping there wouldn't be too many people up there. A bit of a vain hope, and I got interrupted a few times. But over the space of about two hours I collected 70 dowsing response points, which were a mixture of water (negative) and earth energy (positive) reactions. When I say positive and negative, I only mean that the V-rod dips downward over water and upward for any kind of telluric stuff. I also get an upward response for boundaries and entrances, which are distinguishable from the telluric reactions only in that they feel subtly different. More static I guess, rather than flowing.

I got one of these 'boundary' responses while walking up the path towards the church, in an open area with no sign of any boundary. But when I looked around I could see a few clues, such as a change in direction in a nearby wall, suggesting that this was once a perimeter and that the line I was picking up was the original boundary of the churchyard before it got extended. When I got home I dug out some old OS maps and found exactly that – in 1924 and earlier, the churchyard boundary was on that very line. This is one of the things that draws me to dowsing, its uncanny ability to pick up the 'ghost' of things which aren't there any more. Not the ghosts of people (though it can do that as well), but of walls, doorways, paths and hedges.

A tomb with a view.

Water lines in the churchyard
The first thing I did was search for water lines – a bit of old-fashioned water divining. Water is the easiest thing to dowse for, and gives nice decisive responses. I found two parallel water lines crossing the path just inside the churchyard but had the feeling they were modern pipes. Then when I got to the mound itself I started picking up lots of underground water. The first one was a few feet in front of the church door and when I looked down I saw there was a cluster of small iron stop-tap hatches set into the ground. Well that explains that then! But actually it's really nice when you get that corroboration, that there really is underground water in the place where the rod decided to dip. It makes you feel like a bit less of a loony prancing about with a metal stick.

Oh well, that explains the water response here then.

But I soon found more. In fact the stuff seemed to be everywhere. Some of it with very strong reactions, where the rod felt like it was tugging itself out of my hands. And then I realised the little hatches were everywhere too. Some stop-taps, some monitoring hatches, dotted around in odd clusters all around the church foundations on every side. Elsewhere in the churchyard I spotted two much larger inspection hatches which gave me minimal reactions ... one caused the rod a slight twitch, the other nothing. But most of the small hatches on top of the mound were close to points where I got a really strong water reaction. Surely an old church doesn't need this much plumbing? I can only assume that there are a load of springs on the mound, and that they are being actively managed to prevent soggy soil from undermining the church building. It's so precariously perched it's easy to imagine it sliding off down the hill towards Badgeworth after a heavy rainstorm.

As well as the drainage arrangements, I found water lines in a few more interesting places. There was a water line coming out from under the church at each of its four corners (at chancel and tower). This is quite a common thing that most dowsers find at old churches, though don't ask me the reason for it. But in this case, the water line in the north-west corner on the tower was very slightly off alignment. The other three were bang on. I don't know why that one corner should be off, but the tower was rebuilt in 1601 so it's not inconceivable that the water line may be aligned with the original tower; who knows.

It would've been interesting to dowse for water lines inside the church to see where the corner lines go and see if I could find the 'blind spring' which is almost always to be found somewhere near the altar of such an old church. But the church was locked as usual, so I had to limit myself to the outside.

The eastern side of the churchyard has a retaining wall which cuts off the slope of the mound. You can still just see two sculpted ridges in the mound on the right hand side of the photo. The wooden fence follows the line of another, wider ridge lower down. 

Telluric lines
This is where things get a bit more nebulous. The term 'earth energy' is often bandied about without defining what it actually means, and I admit I don't know either. In 30 years of doing this I'm no closer to understanding what it is I'm picking up and I only know that I'm picking up something. Whatever it may be, there are consistencies and patterns in where it appears and how it behaves, and that's good enough for me to want to dowse for it. It dowses positive (i.e. it flips the V-rod upward) but is sometimes more difficult to pin down than water, and more liable to change. It usually has a clear direction of flow but feels like it has less of a defined spatial position ... unlike water it may or may not be underground.

So having got that caveat out of the way, here's what I found. The energy goes around the mound in concentric rings. (It's possible it could be a spiral, but I think it's concentric rings.) These are elliptical and follow the shape of the mound. Nearer the top of the mound the rings are fairly narrow and close together, but as you descend the hill they get progressively broader and and more widely spaced. Dowsing the south side I counted nine rings in total, from the old churchyard boundary up to the church door. They might continue inside for all I know, but I didn't have access. Nor did I have access to the northern or southern sides of the mound, which are on private property. But I did dowse the terraced ridges inside the churchyard and found the energy rings corresponded to them closely, with some additional rings in between them as well.

I also picked up a broad energy line passing through the west wall of the tower, almost dead centre. A corresponding line comes out of (or into) the east wall, but this one seemed to be off centre. As I didn't go in the church, I can't be sure whether it's all the same line, and whether it's straight or not. I picked up another broad line going south-north through the church, but ran out of time to plot any details of it.

The elliptical shape of the hill on the north-eastern side, looking from the churchyard towards the Cotswold hills. You can't see the ridges and terraces very well in this photo, but they are there! The village of Churchdown can be seen on the left, down in the valley, with Cheltenham in the middle distance.

There were a couple of buttresses which seemed to have become active nodes for energy lines. One was on the north side at the edge of the tower. The other was on the south side (almost opposite in fact) on the outside of the south transept. This is not the oldest part of the church by any means, but it seems it's been there long enough to accumulate some telluric welly.

The buttress just to the left of the drainpipe has quite a zap to it. As does the one just visible to the right of the tower.

Anomalies

A small area just to the west of the north porch gave me a very odd reaction with the V-rod, as if something was pulling or jerking the tip of the rod to the right (towards the church). The same spot when dowsed with angle rods was not quite as strong, but the rods did ‘range’ and swing about.

Another oddity was that I got a decisive water response in the pedestrian gateway at the north-west end of the churchyard. I usually get a positive ‘entrance’ or ‘boundary’ response over a gate but the water response was far stronger. I tried dowsing over the hedge to the side of the gate and got the expected boundary responses.

The north porch is unusual in that it has two storeys – the upper floor being a priest's room which once would have served as basic living quarters.

This photo was taken on the public footpath down towards the village, on the north side of the church. My dowsing rod picked this up as an old track-line, running around the base of the mound and crossing the current footpath at right angles.