Will We Get A 2024 Season?
Unless you live outside of England, you can’t have failed to notice what a miserable winter and early spring we’ve experienced. The temperatures have been unusually mild, whilst it has spat, drizzled, rained, downpoured and absolutely chucked it down for what seems to have been a lifetime. Indeed, the months between October 2022 and March 2024 were the wettest 18 months on record in the UK.
The effect of all this rain is that the fields in Hampshire and Wiltshire, the two most circles prone counties in recent years, have taken quite a battering. For an example, look at this photograph taken at the end of March 2024, at Chute Causeway on the border between the counties.
This isn’t an unusual sight. That silver patch in the right of the field isn’t a pond (that’s the area next to it with a scattering of trees), it’s a large puddle of standing water. More importantly, the crop growth on previous years’ tramlines is extremely patchy and could well affect the appearance of any circles should they appear here. And look at that largely bare area between the two tree clumps, though the sparse plant growth here is better than what we’ve seen in more than a few fields across Hampshire, Wiltshire, West Berkshire and Oxfordshire; there we have passed fields where more than a third of the seed seems to have been washed away.
It isn’t all bad news, though. Whilst there are ruined and patchy fields, there are also a fair number of those which still seem in reasonable condition. Take this example, again in the Hampshire-Wiltshire borderlands:
At the time of the photo being taken, the crop had still not reached full bloom. Even so, the field looks okay.
From the above image, you may be wondering if the oilseed rape plants have flowered early and you would be correct to do so. However, the Crop Circle Center website shows that we’ve seen circles in this crop as early as 10 May (2000), exactly 24 years to the day that this article has been published. And then there’s the 14 April 2009 formation as well. These may be outliers but things currently aren’t as different in the fields of southern England than you may have thought.
Hopefully 2024 will provide us with another crop circle season to get our teeth into. Whilst we’re not anticipating anything other than a trend-following season of low numbers, we still expect there to be a decent batch. But let’s see how long we have to wait.
