Field Report for Silbury Hill (2), July 9th by Mike Callahan

 WAITING FOR IMAGES

My Field Report was carried out on the afternoon after the formation was discovered. There were no ‘grapeshot’ circles outside the formation. On entering it struck me how very little crop was standing. In many of the formations this year there have been standing tufts and/or individual undamaged stems. Very little of this here.  In fact the lay was generally tidy and going in a clockwise formation around the formation. There were no ‘nests’ in the formation.

One part of the formation had 16 or so spaces and standing crop in between. The crop lay was facing towards the outer band. Again there was very little standing crop. This was in contrast to the other section of the formation where the crop converged. Here the crop lay was facing away from the outer band.

An interesting feature of the formation was the way that the crop was often swept back and not totally flattened. I moved some of this crop out of the way and underneath the crop was neatly lay down facing in a different direction. There were some areas where there were 2/3 layers of crop.

I checked out the nodes. I found no evidence of any bending of nodes. I found no evidence of elongation of the node immediately beneath the seed head when compared with other crop elsewhere in the field. (at least not to the naked eye). I found no evidence of blown out nodes. I sampled the crop from the formation with crop from elsewhere in the field and could not find any significant differences visible with the naked eye. This hasn’t been the case with other formations this year. The tracks in the formation were very intricate. Again, the crop lay was very neat and tidy.

An impressive formation set in a magical setting.

Click on thumbnails to enlarge

© Photographs Mike Callahan