If you missed the first part of Top of the Croppies 2024, click here to catch up.

The cerealogical world dictates that he who shouts loudest very often craves attention and acceptance. The chance to be a big fish in a small pond. The opportunity to be a someone. We shrug our shoulders when it comes to those who like to theorise on the circles’ origins, but when ol’ loud mouth seems to be working in association with vocal bottom-rung hoaxers it’s time to speak up. They do croppiedom no favours.

Our 2024 Top of the Croppies champion has been unanimously selected by our panel of three croppies, one wharfinger, three golfers seen at Blacklands, some homeless bloke called Pete and Clarence the now unemployed lion, the latter once responsible for getting road repairs done in Wiltshire. 

And there could only have been one winner. We give you…

Croppiedom is full of tall tales related to the unexpected discovery of new formations. The best known is the one involving the pilot who flew over Stonehenge during daylight hours in 1996, came back 45 minutes later and discovered the legendary Julia Set. ‘It must have been made in that time!’ bellowed hundreds of thousands of voices that still haven’t settled down. (Either that pilot was deliberately spinning a yarn or just didn’t notice the circle underneath him.) We’ve also had psychic helicopter pilots, but the more routine tales typically involve a John Smith or Carol Jenkins who were out walking their dogs, or following the footpath in the direction of the pub at the neighbouring village, and saw the outline of a crop circle.

Some of the Carols and Johns and their kind were completely real, but we hazard that a fair proportion of them were fake identities used by the circle makers themselves. Even the Crop Circle Connector eventually gave up on making these testimonies public, finally realising nobody was going to believe reports from Peter Jones, Angela Boxall, Clive Richards or even Dave Bury, Elton Barnes, Barbara Castle, Maud Hinton and Tammy Paxman. It seemed much easier for everyone to just do away with the cover stories and simply share details of the crop circle. Inconvenient questions could just be ignored or refuted with claims the witness did not want their details to be made public.

We thought we’d heard the last of the cover stories until the morning of Sunday 30 June, when one Mark ‘Billy’ Breen, a retired plasterer from north-east Bristol, posted footage of himself inside a rather ugly crop circle in the field opposite the entrance to the Stonehenge Visitors Centre. According to his story, he’d come ‘for the sunrise’, found the weather to be ‘overcast’ and then ‘found this [crop circle] on the way home.’ Rather than chuckle at the stunted, slightly misaligned monstrosity he’d discovered, Breen went on to ejaculate superlatives over the formation’s ‘phenomenal design’, pondering ‘god only knows how you’d begin to make this’. Something was clearly amiss, not just a simpleton’s brain being unable to untangle five straight lines, six circles and fifteen semi-circles. He was trying too hard, especially with his praise of the five poodle legs, one of which was notably shorter than the others. Was Breen seeing something nobody else was? No. We were aware he had been in conversation with members of the Team Ten Watt hoaxing collective shortly before, telling Dawn ‘Queenie’ Tottle that Sunday would be a good day for her to fly over Stonehenge.

Let’s get this straight. After advising Queenie to take a flight over Stonehenge on the Sunday, a relatively unknown croppie goes to Stonehenge Visitors Centre — which is a good mile or so from Stonehenge itself — to capture footage of the sunrise, even though thick cloud and rain had been widely forecast, and just happens to stumble upon a shit hoax.

A representative of The Croppie just couldn’t resist messaging Breen to ask for more details, knowing he wouldn’t be able to refrain from talking and digging himself an even bigger hole. ‘I went to get a sunrise from Stonehenge,’ blustered silly Billy, before adding, ‘you can see the formation from the road’. Of course, Breenoid. You went to get the sunrise at Stonehenge by attempting to put the drone up from over a mile away, even though it’s way easier to fly from the pull-in much closer to Stonehenge on the A303. And you just stumbled across a crop circle that is definitely not visible from the road, something confirmed by three regular photographic contributors to this website. As we said at the time, Breen’s lame excuse is akin to capturing a midday, snowstorm photo of the Avebury Stone Circle whilst sitting in your car at Silbury Hill under a full moon at 3am. It’s laughable.

The string of remarkable coincidences involving Breen completely collapsed in on itself after we performed some more digging on Facebook. Less than 24 hours before the formation appeared, Team Ten Watt’s Dene Hine commented on a photo Breen had taken of barley fields close to Blandford Forum in Dorset. ‘Nice ready fields,’ he observed. Ready for what? Harvest? No. Pagan rituals? Probably not. You don’t need to even be a quarter-wit to understand what Hine meant, especially as Breen responded, ‘I’ll see what I can find on my way home.’ Funny that.

So, it is not beyond the realm of good possibility that Breen headed to the Ten Watt targeted Stonehenge area, found the field by the Visitors Centre and passed on his discovery. That the field was rye, a crop avoided by experienced circle makers due to its tall height, suggests it had been lined up by someone who didn’t know their arse from their elbow, or their oilseed rape from their wheat. Then, by another remarkable string of coincidences, Billy bullshitter just happens to stumble across a crop circle in this same location on the same day he wanted his acquaintance to get on board a private plane. 

Just to highlight things a little more clearly, on 19 July, Breen just happened to be at Badbury Rings in Dorset to discover another hoaxed crop circle made by his Ten Watt brethren.

The irony in this sad shit show is that the Team Ten Watt collective have routinely called out the Crop Circle Connector for learning of new crop circles and then dispatching their in-house photographer of choice to capture images. At least their photographer may actually be responding to a genuine report from a member of the public. In Breen’s case it’s flagrantly transparent where the tip-off has come from, none of which does anything to help relationships between croppies and the Wiltshire farming community.

As if to cause further friction between agriculture workers and croppies, we’ve seen Breen lording it over farmers. At Normanton Down he was seen wading through standing crops. His defence of following a deer track was proven to be nonsense when a still showed the lazy elf, dressed like he was fresh from a golf course in Malaga, striding his way from the edge of the field, leaving a ‘wanker track’ behind him.

At Etchilhampton he deliberately ignored a request to keep out of the field from the farmer who was grieving the loss of his own father. Breen issued a veiled, rude response to would-be critics, smugly suggesting the farmer has ‘much more to think about than people walking in his crops.’ That’s unappetising … but we’ve learnt this year from Mark Breen that it’s all about him. Yes, him. His largely unedited drone videos often begin with a shot of him, as if to remind his audience that he was responsible. Yes, he, Mark ‘Billy’ Breen, is such a ‘nice guy’, as he’s repeatedly reminded us, though his ‘kindness’ should not be mistaken for ‘weakness’. No, Mark, the weakness is between the ears. Nice guys don’t go out of their way to publicly wind up farmers or jump on board with convicted criminals who work as hoaxers to get likes on Facebook and TikTok. Just look over your shoulder as Fwankie won’t be happy that you’re getting there before him.

Finally, a portent. Breen has done a Guy Cross and taken to the beach in an attempt to impress us with his sand art. To be fair, he’s done a better job than Ten Watt reprobate Deiniol ‘Dan’ Davies. But we think there certainly could be more to come from Breen. Just recently he predicted a ‘massive’ upturn in the number of crop circles, writing ‘I’m not sure if ever they have made any crop circle or left messages in cornfields in the past but you never can say what will come in the future.’ He suggests he’s talking about aliens, but we’ve seen from his other posts on Facebook that he’s under no illusions as to how crop circles are made.

Why do we suspect that someone could end up huffing and puffing under the stars in 2025? Just make sure that Grand Tourneo with its personalised number plate is kept well away from the fields after dark. It won’t take a genius to work out who it belongs to. Then again, Mark seemed to think that nobody would realise his all-too-obvious Facebook chat would link him to the abominable poodle legs at the Stonehenge Visitors Centre.

Here it is. The crop circle world has sunk so low that, in a weird paradox, Billy Breen is Top of the Croppies 2024. Let this be the title and attention he deserves. If nothing else comes from it, 2025 might see him teaching the other Ten Watters how to correctly divide up a circle into equal parts using a laser level. But is that a good thing? Hmmmmm…