Late 1940s and early 1950s - Alton Barnes area, Wiltshire
These reports came to light through researcher, Andreas Müller, who uncovered an historical account from Shirley Carson, mother of well-known Alton Barnes farmer, Tim Carson.
Mrs Carson's hitherto unknown story included memories of two separate circles events in the vicinity of Alton Barnes back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Mrs Carson's account, transcribed by Andreas, reads as follows: “One day my father came home from the fields and was quite exited because he had discovered a circular ring flattened into the crop, and wondered about what could have caused it. Its diameter was about 30 feet [nine metres], and its path was something like half-a-metre wide. My father was a down-to-earth and rational man, he explained it to have been the work of an eerie whirlwind or dust twister – the ones you can see lifting up straw and dirt on a road. He thought this would be a reasonable explanation for this ring." This event happened in the late-1940s, and the description is clearly of a ring rather than a full circle. Mrs Carson also tells of a second formation, in the early 1950s: “This explanation [for the first ring, noted above] became questioned just a few years later when my father discovered another ‘circle’, but now made of two concentric rings of a similar size. While the crop in the inner circle was precisely laid in one direction, the outer ring was laid in the opposite direction. In the view of this new 'circle' we all realised that this could hardly be explained by a whirlwind anymore. We had no idea what could have caused it, but we did not wonder too much about it. We took it as a little mystery.” To the right, are our impressions of what the two ring/circle events would have looked like. |
Mrs Carson's observations continue:
“It was a time when the fields had no tramlines [tracks made by modern-day tractors while spraying crops], so the ring centre in both cases was in the middle of undisturbed standing crop ... this was kind of a mystery to us."
“It was a time when the fields had no tramlines [tracks made by modern-day tractors while spraying crops], so the ring centre in both cases was in the middle of undisturbed standing crop ... this was kind of a mystery to us."
Location
We know from Mrs Carson's details, that both events were in fields to the side of the road which runs approximately north from Alton Barnes, in the direction of Lockeridge. Many more circles have been recorded in these fields in more recent decades. Click on the aerial photo to enlarge. Alton Barnes is marked near the bottom. The rings would have appeared somewhere inside the red circle. |
historic old crop circles - UK circles