The second formation to appear in Essex Map Ref: TL 492 404. It's located in Striate, which is only half a mile from Littlebury Green to the north. Ring circle, with a Nuclear Symbol in the middle, about 100ft in diameter, in Rape Seed. It appeared Thursday/Friday morning the 2nd of May.

An analysis of the Formation by Ilyes

This 'Nuclear Symbol' doesn't offer us a whole lot to analyse from the air ... but here are 4 interesting curiosities:

1) Each of the 'arrow tips' appears to be a different length - the one pointing to 1 o'clock seems the shortest, barely touching the Ring, the 5 o'clock one seems next-longest, and the 9 o'clock one doesn't even close before it gets to the Ring. (It all could be a trick of perspective, I know ...) But if not, this play on '3' is something the CircleMakers have done before, like in the A361 'dumbbell' with 3 Paths tipped with 3 Circles surrounding the smaller of the two Circles. (Ron Russell called it the 'Orb and Sceptre' - it was magnificently laid and didn't last any time at all - farmer harvested immediately.) Each of the 3 Paths was a different length: short, longer, longest. They've done that twice that I've seen so far - and here, that each of these appear slightly different is interesting to me. (I'd love to see additional aerial angles on this ... )

2) The centres for at least 2 of the 3 semicircles lie *outside* the Formation, in the field. Because of the aerial angle and the closeness of the tramlines tangent to the Ring, it's hard to see exactly where the centre of that right-most semicircle is...

3) The top 1/3 of the laid, inner Circle is clockwise, and has some nicely angled perimeter stalks - they show up better on my print-out than on-screen.

4) THE SHAPE that they've been showing us over and over and over again is also in this one: It's the shape of the 3 laid sections of Circle in-between the standing 'propeller': the arc with the two curving sides coming down to a point opposite the arc. Last year, we saw this feature in Barton-Le-Clay's 3 middle laid sections  as well as in the large, outermost standing areas in the Silbury Hill Flower AND the almost-identical Chehalis Flower, to name only a few. That SHAPE is something special, and has been haunting me ... Now, here it is again ...

Return to the Crop Circles of 1997