Our research began through a series of discoveries we made at the start of the 1997 crop circle season. The season began quite unexpectedly on 20th April when the earliest ever formation appeared; this was at Barbury Castle just south of Wroughton in Wiltshire.
We noticed, almost immediately, the obvious similarity that this formation had to the one at Littlebury Green in Essex from the previous year (to the right). We wondered if the geometric connections between the two patterns might be alerting us to other as yet unseen connections. To this end we drew a line between them on a map and looked for any significant points along that line. It was then that we discovered that the very line between them appeared to run along 2 of the most ancient pathways in the country, The Ridgeway and The Icknield Way. The line that we had drawn on the map did not deviate far either side of the old trackways. There was, quite literally, a connecting path between these two dynamic formations! Imagine our excitement when the second formation of '97 was at Littlebury Green! If this was confirmation from the Circlemakers that we were on the right track we needed no further encouragement to continue this line of investigation.
Having found this relationship we were eager to look for evidence that there were more formations connected by these ancient routes. The spectacular formation at Barton-le-clay in 1996 in Bedfordshire (left) was one such example. This formation was 2 miles from the Icknield Way near where it joins the Ridgeway. Other formations that have occurred close to these ancient trackways are: Liddington Castle, south of Swindon in 1996 (below, top left) and the DNA formation at Eastfield, Alton Barnes, Wiltshire in the same year (top right) and the web formation at Avebury, Wiltshire in 1994 (bottom left) and the Mandelbrot set at Ickleton, south of Cambridge in 1991 (bottom right). We realised that there were a great number of formations that occurred near to these pilgrim routes. What was the importance of them and why did they seem to be attracting a large proportion of each year's 'crop' of formations?
The locations of the next two formations to occur took our breath away. There was another at Barbury Castle on or around the 3rd May 1997 (below left) and then one at Strethall, Essex (less than 1 Mile from Littlebury Green!) on the 5th May 1997 (below right)
These locations were almost an identical replay of the first two and felt to us like proof absolute that we were on the right 'track'. But what is or was this track? We needed to know more.
The Ridgeway
We knew little about the Ridgeway except that it was an ancient route which is now a designated footpath. Intrigued that crop circle sites should be connected in this way we decided to pay a visit to the map room of the library and find out where this ancient trackway went next. Looking at one OS map after the other we discovered that the Ridgeway runs for a considerable distance east/west across the country. It starts at Alton Priors as a tree-lined track which runs up the side of East Field! Everyone with any knowledge of crop circles will recognise the name of the world famous field which has been graced with more formations, and some of the most stunning, than any other plot of land in the world. From there it goes north and passes through the Sanctuary and skirts Avebury as it goes on to Barbury Castle.
There it turns sharply to the right and continues through Oxfordshire across country, crossing the Thames at Goring and continuing as the Icknield Way as far as Cambridgeshire, near Ickleton. This we immediately recognised as being where the famous Mandelbrot fractal formation occurred in 1991 - the same year as the original Barbury Castle formation (above left). Were we being pointed to something?
The Ridgeway is an ancient route, some would say the oldest extant route. In "The Ridgeway Path"by Sean Jennet it says that the route has been in use for more than four thousand years. It appears to run along the tops of chains of hills including the Chilterns. Originally it went south beyond Alton Priors across the Vale of Pewsey to Salisbury Plain and Stonehenge. It is believed to have continued south into Dorset and on to the English Channel. At the other end the Icknield way went originally through Cambridgeshire to Grimes Grave in Norfolk and then to the North sea coast.
The old route kept to the chalk ridges and this forks from Wiltshire. It divides to pass south of the Thames valley, as the South Downs Way and North Downs Way, towards Eastbourne and Dover, and north of that valley as the Ridgeway and Icknield Way, through Wiltshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.
In The Oldest Road: The Ridgeway by Godwin and Anderson, referring to the Ridgeway near Avebury they ask:-
"How has it escaped the plough over thousands of years of close-fisted land-owning and jealous property rights?...here, where the ancient road served the heart of the lost civilisation that produced the Great Stone Culture, something has protected it, something more powerful than laws or charters, an atavistic fear perhaps... It is as if over thousands and thousands of years ordinary greedy men were brought up short by - what? A line of footsteps in the muddy chalk? A feeling that a road trodden by countless generations has established property rights of its own? A simpler sense, felt in the bowels rather than the mind, that to plough the Ridgeway would exact retribution from the ghosts of all these years?... The fact is that the Ridgeway on these Downs has remained unploughed, a right of way established for the human race by laws older than any writ of man."
The same feeling was expressed by Richard Jefferies in 1879 in his "Wild Life in a Southern County":-
"Plough and harrow press hard on the ancient track, and yet dare not encroach upon it."
Pilgrim routes & sacred sites
As we checked through the crop circle database we saw that formations had occurred on or close by other ancient trackways as well; in particular the North & South Downs Ways.
Clearly these ancient paths have held great significance to generations of people going back to prehistory. So what is it that connects these very old trackways to, what appears to be, the very modern and mysterious phenomenon of crop formations?
Crop formations are well known for occurring close to various ancient sacred sites; Stonehenge (below right) in 1996, Silbury Hill (below left) in 1997 and Avebury area being prime examples.
Our ancestors needed paths to travel between their sacred sites; could it be that we were really seeing a correlation between crop circles and sacred sites? Although we could assemble an impressive list of formations which occurred within a ten-mile radius of the above sites, we could also list numerous formations which did not appear close to any known sacred site. There may, of course, be many ancient sacred sites that do not exist anymore but many of these had medieval abbeys and cathedrals superimposed upon them, and we were not seeing crop circles clustering round the cities which now contain them. Also there are numerous stone circles etc. which are in areas which do not have crop circles. The circles of Cornwall or Scotland being such examples. So it seemed to us that although certain sacred sites are correlated to crop circle locations they are not a causative factor. It felt like something else attracted both.
Earth energy currents
In "The Icknield Way" by Edward Thomas he says:-
"In the Mabinogion is the story of the dream of Emperor Moxen. He dreams of and then finds a beautiful woman in a castle. He gives her three castles. Her name is Helen and she connects all the castles in Britain by high roads (the main street of most English towns is still called the High Street or High Road)."
In the Hibbert Lectures of 1889 Sir John Rhys believes her to be a pagan goddess:-
"There is a certain poetic propriety in associating the primitive paths and roads of the country with the vagrant goddess of dawn and dusk."
In other words, the ancient tracks are associated with the Earth goddess. Could this be a memory of the presence of Earth energies along such tracks? (see 'The Sun and The Serpent' under Icknield Way.) For when we look at the route of the Ridgeway and Icknield Way we see that they tally with the flow of the Michael/Mary currents from Avebury to Royston. As the first four crop formations of 1997 had alternated between opposite ends of this section of routeway, Earth energy currents looked a likely candidate as a causative factor in the location of crop formations. Unfortunately there is no map of Earth energy currents of Britain. However, we were aware of our own and other people's findings by dowsing for these telleuric forces.
Earth energy currents are often misnamed ley lines. A ley line is actually a straight line that can be drawn on a map that connects four or more ancient sites, e.g. churches, stone circles, barrows etc. Earth energy currents are the actual vibrant flows of detectable energy that weave their way through the ground. These currents meander like rivers and do invariably run through ancient sacred sites. For an excellent account of the way Earth energy currents behave see the groundbreaking book 'The Sun and The Serpent' by Hamish Miller and Paul Broadhurst.
We were very familiar with Earth energy currents around Avebury and Winchester, the two main areas for crop circles. Avebury is halfway along the length of the Michael/Mary line and is at the centre of a huge landscape temple of sacred sites including Silbury Hill, Merlin's Mound, Morgan's Hill, the Sanctuary, West Kennet Long Barrow, Windmill Hill and Avebury Henge itself. The energy currents weave an intricate pattern around the landscape and leave one in no doubt as to the energetic importance of this area. An early commentator comparing Stonehenge to Avebury said it was like a parish church in comparison to a cathedral. Having lived in the village himself, with the Michael energy current running through the back yard, Glenn can testify to the strength of the energy there. We, like many others, believe that this was, and still is, the energy centre of England.
Winchester Cathedral is built on the site of a former stone circle (which had satellites nearby) and straddles a main artery of Earth energy that arises close by in the totally spring-fed Meon valley. A visit to the crypts of the cathedral is a remarkable experience when one is actually able to stand directly in the flow of the very powerful energy current. Winchester stands close by several powerful energetic hilltops marked out for ceremony by our ancient forebears who knew the power in the Earth at this place. This was reflected by the importance attributed to the area by later cultures such as it being the centre of Roman Britain and it becoming the capital city of King Alfred's Britain.
Chalk
However we were still not satisfied that Earth energy was the sole reason for crop circles occurring in an area. Why, for example, are there no crop formations around Glastonbury? It undoubtedly has strong energy currents. It sits just 'downstream', energetically-speaking, from Avebury on the Michael/Mary currents. It has quite as intricate a web of energy patterning, if not more so, than Avebury and can boast the powerful Tor, Chalice Well and Abbey not to mention the landscape temple of the Glastonbury Zodiac spread out in the surrounding countryside of the Somerset Levels. And yet there are never any formations in the vicinity.
Then something struck us. As we worked through reports of previous years' formations and as we read more about the ancient trackways we noticed one word kept repeating over and over again - CHALK! The Ridgeway, the Icknield Way, the North and South Downs Ways are all chalk ridges. We knew that East Field was strewn with chalk rocks around its edges and many of the fields which have had several formations over the years have a white dusting in the winter months as the plough brings the chalk to the surface in the newly tilled fields. Could this be what we were looking for? The only way to find out was to plot all the formations for each year onto a geological map of Britain. This we did for the period 1993-1998 (up to July 22nd to date). The results of our research are shown in the maps and tables below.
N.B. Crop circles are represented by the small black dots on the maps.
They basically show that an average of 71% of all UK crop formations each year occur on chalk or its neighbouring greensand, and if we just look at the area south of a line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel (85-90% of all formations are south of this line) the figure increases to 79%.
Underground water
These figures are remarkable by any standards. We had to ask the question, what is going on? Why are chalk or greensand attracting crop formations? The answer became apparent when we discovered that this area of chalk is the main aquifer of Southern England - water is the key! This realisation suddenly made sense of all the previous connections we had seen with the trackways, sacred sites and Earth energy currents.
All sacred sites across the world, to our knowledge, are located above underground water- every stone circle, pyramid, temple etc. It is also our contention that our ancestors who built these sites knew this very well and consciously utilised the associated energy. There is a well (now in the 'pool' room of the pub) at the centre of Avebury henge, seismic surveying has recently discovered a previously unknown well near the centre of Stonehenge, and underground water has even been detected in the desert underneath the Great Pyramid. Earth energy currents are also associated with underground water.
Rain falls on the chalk Downs and is soaked up like in a sponge. The water percolates through the porous chalk and through fissures to the impervious clay underlying it and then runs along the clay until it emerges on the surface as a spring. This springline is often in the sandy soils which adjoin the chalk.
Put very simply we are stating that there is always underground water present where crop formations occur.
We then replotted all the data for the period 1993-98 onto a Hydrogeological map of England to see how the formations correlated with the aquifers. Our results are shown in the maps and charts below.
The figures this time were even more remarkable. 87% of all formations in England occurred above an aquifer, and this figure rose to nearly 93% for the area of Britain south of a line from the Bristol Channel to the Wash.
When the percentages for both types of aquifer are added together the combined total is even more remarkable. 87.2% for England and 92.9% for southern England, below the aforementioned line.
Flowing Water & Earth Energy
Again this isn't the sole cause determining where crop formations occur because there are places with underground aquifers which don't have formations.
It appears that a combination of underground water and Earth energy currents is what attracts or allows crop formations to occur in any particular location.
Why should this be so? The answer only becomes apparent when we think in terms of energy.
"Pure water will not transmit an electric current...the greater the content of dissolved and suspended matter in the water the greater its capacity to carry an electric current."
(See Living Energies by Callum Coates.)
The water contained in the major aquifers of England are heavily-laden with minerals thus making them highly-conductive conduits for the energy currents coursing through the Earth. Electromagnetic energy, just like electricity, will rapidly make its way to the best conductor around. For example, the chalk Ridgeway attracts the powerful Michael/Mary energy currents between Avebury and Royston.
Furthermore, the chalk is alkaline and this is saturated with water. There is clay which contains a lot of flint, (which is silicon or quartz) underlying the chalk and also a thin layer on the top ridges of the chalk Downs. This is acidic. We therefore have an alkaline solution sandwiched on either side by an acidic layer. This attracts and is then activated and 'charged up' by the powerful currents of energy flowing through the ground. This area is like a massive energised whiteboard upon which the Circlemakers are able to apply their 'programmes'. Another aspect which needs further investigation is the fact that water flowing through restrictive channels such as fissures spirals as it does so (look at your bath water disappearing down the drain) and so vortexial energy becomes involved.
We would suggest that holy wells and healing waters were revered and used by our forebears because they worked. The waters were potentised by the Earth energy currents which they attracted. These were very localised points of Earth energy and underground water, not on a scale large enough to attract crop formations but displaying the same principles nonetheless.
Fixing an energetic blueprint
We would recommend readers who are interested in the energetic properties of water to read about the work of Victor Schauberger. (see Living Energies by Callum Coates). We all know of the energetic properties of crystal. You wouldn't be able to read this on your computer without them because the silicon chips which are the basis of all computers are made from quartz crystal. Virtually our entire technology is based on using crystal. Research from several different sources is now showing that water also has a 'memory' capability, and it is even more powerful and versatile than crystal because it has the added advantage of fluidity or movement. Extending the computer analogy, quartz is to water like a single computer is to the Internet, the fluidity facilitates communication or exchange of information.
Jacques Beneveniste, a French medical scientist made a remarkable discovery. He was scientifically testing homoeopathic remedies for the alleviation of allergy symptoms and discovered that these highly diluted remedies were effective. Then he did an experiment. He placed a small container of a toxin on top of a copper coil which was connected to another coil on top of which was a container of water. After passing an electric current through the coils he discovered that the water, which had never been in physical contact with the toxin, had the same effect on laboratory rats as the toxin itself. For his troubles in making what appears to us to be a fantastically important discovery he had his funding withdrawn and his lab was closed down as the establishment proceeded to destroy his reputation. We are pleased to say that he is continuing his work.
The important point here is that an energetic blueprint can be 'fixed' in water by the application of an electric current. When a crop formation occurs is its energy blueprint, or some might say its 'message', fixed into the water present in the energised aquifer beneath? As the chalk Downs provide the water supply for much of southern England, is a third of the population of this country drinking the 'messages in the fields'? Possibly an even more staggering scenario is in action. If water is such a good conductor of energy/communicator of information, all underground water is connected to springs, streams, rivers, the seas and oceans, and back up rivers and streams on the other side of oceans to their water sources. This would mean that everyone in the world would be drinking the 'crop formations'! According to homoeopathic laws the greater the dilution the greater the potency and so the size of the oceans may act to amplify the potency of the formations energy pattern.
by Glenn Broughton & Steve Page August 1998.