REPORT:  This new arrival lies about half a mile south-east of the famous Iron Age hillfort Cissbury Ring, on Bostal Road, which runs from Sompting to Steyning. 

The formation is pretty difficult to find, as it is nestled in the hollow of the field and cannot be seen from the road at any point.  It is only when walking along the footpath towards Steep Down Hill that it comes into view, although an excellent view of it is afforded if you stand upon Steep Down Hill looking back across to Cissbury Ring. 

The formation is in wheat and at first glance looks much more like a traditional Sussex-style design than many of those we have received recently, and appears to reference the two-armed Sompting Spinner design of 2002, but this time there are four long tapering arms leading to 33ft clockwise circles.  The main central circle is 126ft, and anticlockwise. 

From the edge of the field the formation looks pretty neat.  Inside, however, the crop has been heavily crushed to the ground and is very noticeably kinked with obvious white crease marks on the downed stems (a feature that we have found in every known man-made formation that we've visited).  Last year, only one Sussex formation overtly displayed these marks - this year it has been worryingly rife. 

As far as the geometry goes, this is a very simple but smart design.  It would be perfectly suited to easy construction, as once the basic orthogonal axes have been established, all the necessary marker points from which the various arcs are constructed could be quickly and easily located. 

The lay is fairly neat over the formation as a whole, although it becomes noticeably haphazard and disjointed as it curves in towards the crescent tips of the arms, where they meet the small satellite circles.  Having worked out the geometry whilst still inside the formation, we were able to go and check out the spots where someone would have needed to stand in order for a planker to plank out his path.  At these spots the crop is very damaged, broken and flat to the ground, and in one instance there is a place which could indicate where someone has stood too close to the edge of the main circle and left a slight scallop in what should have been standing crop.  In a number of these points, there is dried mud visible on the crop. 

There is quite a volume of flattened crop in this design, and little attention has been afforded to minor details such as leaving standing or nested centres.  It is a difficult thing to convey verbally, but compared to the 2002 Sompting Spinner, the experience of being in this formation couldn't be more different.  The original Spinner was pristine inside, with a fluid, energetic lay and somehow much more poetically-positioned in the landscape.  It was an original idea with an awesome heptagonal-based geometry, as extracted by researcher Martin Keitel.  It's worth noting that in the 2002 formation, we personally spoke to a couple of local children, a brother and his sister who, unprompted by us, relayed a story of how they had seen a light hovering over the field during the night of its appearance. It was so bright, it had scared them to the point where they slept in the same bed with the covers pulled up over their heads. 

As an aside, several members of Southern Circular Research recently gathered on top of Cissbury Ring for a meditation to mark the tenth anniversary of an experiment they had carried out there in 1994 with psychic Paul Bura. Though this meditation was not common knowledge, it's just interesting to note that this new formation is the first to appear within sight of Cissbury Ring for nine years, a curious synchronicity, whatever or whoever made it.