Field report crop circle near Tarlton, Glos, visited 09:10 21^st April 2015 

A very interesting formation and unlike any I've seen before. The circlemakers chose this field of what I took to be winter wheat, barely 30cm high – despite its being surrounded by fields full of well-grown oilseed rape - only three fields away from last year's 15^th July formation and making an exact straight line with the 27^th July 2015 formation at Cherington 3.5km away.  

Access is easy. Having identified the field from the OS map. I parked in the field entrance, and chose the middle one of the five tramlines which run into the field perpendicular to the road. This tramline cuts into the formation, but you could still walk past and miss it, and it is totally invisible from the next tramline. Without having seen the aerials it would have been hard to be sure that there was anything there. The formation was as yet un-trampled by coach loads of visitors and I couldn't see any footprints, although the ground is admittedly hard and dry.  

None of the leaves (there are no flowering stems yet) was flattened to the ground and very few were even bent or depressed at all. Rather, the leaves within the patterns were slightly wilted, tinged with pale brown or yellowy edges, almost as if slightly scorched. The affected leaves were often just one or two leaves out of a whole clump from one plant, with the neighbouring leaves untouched.  So this was a different effect from that seen in other almost invisible formations such as Beckhampton 28.6.09 where the linseed was kind of twirled at the flower head and then recovered.  

Sometimes the growing tips here were more affected and at others the yellowing or browning was along the edges of the whole length of the leaf or unevenly distributed all over. If it was not for this selective action, and the fact that only the leaves within the pattern revealed from the aerial shots were damaged, one could say that there was a similar effect to what can happen with accidental over-application of contact herbicides; or with frost or hot wind damage to the growing tips, though in the recently temperate weather conditions of south Gloucestershire we can rule out extreme temperature variations in this case. The detailed patterns shown in the aerial photos, which include differential effects creating light and dark (more leaves affected in some parts of the pattern than others), would require a very precise application of  finely calculated doses of herbicide or other chemical to achieve such an effect, and these would have to be delivered by a drone or other overhead device which would have to be rather more precisely controlled than the ones used for taking crop circle photos seem to be capable of.  

I therefore conclude that it's more likely that the leaves in this formation were wilted using an attenuated and very finely calibrated form of the same kind of microwave-type energy which is thought to bend stems and explode nodes in 'normal' crop formations.

Worth a visit, especially for anyone who still thinks crop circles are made with planks and bits of string!

Graham Timmins