A composite image of pole shots of the crop formation in West Overton (a couple of miles from Avebury), which appeared on July 19, in wheat. 

 The design is simple, consisting of about eight “dumbbell” shapes and a few other circles and rings.  The dumbbell style first appeared more than 15 years ago, and was basically first crop circle style to have straight lines.  When crop circles got more complex the dumbbells became very scarce. 

 The various elements of the formation are spread across perhaps 2,000 feet of the field.  I’d guess that the largest of the dumbbells is a bit over a hundred feet long.  They are all diagonal to the tramlines, and oriented NE/SW. 

  Most of these dumbbells are plain vanilla, and don’t even have the short lines on the sides of the bars which nearly all of them had in the 1990s.  But one of them is quite unusual, having two parallel bars, and three rings (shown on the right side of the picture).  And there is a very peculiar place (not in the picture) where it looks as if things went horribly wrong, with the parts of a dumbbell chaotically mixed up with a lot of wind damage.  Perhaps the “transmission” got garbled? 

 The most interesting thing to me is that all the standing crop in the rings is in perfect condition -- clearly nobody stood in the centres holding a rope (which is usually required to make a circle).  I once made a very large ring without anyone standing in the centre, but it required three men standing in different tramlines to anchor the rope which a fourth man used to stomp the ring.  That technique was definitely not used here, because there were no places for the three men to stand. 

Finally; the lay of the crop is absolutely lovely -- as if water had flowed around pushing down the crop.