Location: Below Long Man, Wilmington, East Sussex 

Description: a pair of feet, each with five toes 

First seen on Thursday 24^th July 2025 

Visited and photographed at midday Friday 25^th July 2025. 

Weather between Wednesday night 23^rd July and Friday 25^th midday was warm and sunny with little to no rain. 

Crop was very ripe and mature but appeared to be shorter than normal. Possibly due to unusually dry spring / early summer. 

Formation was on a north facing, small hillock at the southern end of the field, immediately at the base of the Long Man of Wilmington. 

There is no doubt that the formation represents a pair of bare feet, both with five toes. It is situated absolutely perfectly on the hillock so that the feet are visible as soon as you arrive at the Long Man car park and remain visible as you walk toward the figure. 

As you start to climb Windover Hill, the feet temporarily disappear from sight. When they reappear and you get close to the side and ultimately the head of the Long Man, it becomes quite difficult to ascertain what they are. There is no doubt that they are meant to be visible as you approach and are below the Long Man. 

• The big toes are approx. 2m / 6’ wide and are by no means circular. The other toes gradually diminish in size until you reach the little toes which are approx. 90cm / 3’ wide.
• The ball of the foot would be in the region of approx. 5m to 7m in width with the heel being maybe 4m to 6m.
• The lay was clockwise around the heel, down the outside of the instep to the ball, clockwise around the ball and then back up the inside of the instep to the heel.
• There were no signs of nodal bending or expulsion cavities but that would be because the crop was at maturation and was devoid of moisture.
• There were no crease marks visible on the crop most of which had been laid at ground level.
• There were no visible signs of trampling or damage.
• It is quite possible that no-one else had entered the formation prior to my arrival as there were no visible tracks through the crop from the pathway alongside the field.
• The right foot was away from the tramlines with no visible signs of entry and so I did not enter it.
• There was only one part of the formation that crossed a tramline and that was the left big toe. At that point, the lay of the crop left the general clockwise swirl and partly headed in the opposite direction.
• On the opposite side of the tramline where a small portion of the big toe had been laid, some crop had been pulled into the flow from behind, and from within, standing crop.
• In the feet themselves, the crop was only lightly laid and there were many standing stems.

Whilst the obvious conclusion is that the pair of feet are manmade simply because of their location, we should not forget that this field had its first visitation some 35 years ago in 1990 when a ‘broken’ dumbbell appeared. The field immediately to the west had an impressive yin-yang symbol in 1995 and then in 2014 two formations appeared. To the north a complex pentagram, and to the east a Celtic cross type formation. 2021 saw some rather odd shapes just to the north of the 2014 Celtic cross. 

Barry Reynolds 25^th July 2025