There are only two constants in this life: a beginning and an end. The rest is all about ups and downs. Here, we focus on the downs and ask our circle makers to tell us about their worst nights in the field.

​The worst experience came very early in my circle making career.

It seemed a little doomed from the start. Our chosen parking place was already taken by another vehicle. We tried to wait it out, but time is always critical, so we selected another place to park our cars. It meant an unplanned entrance to the field through a route we hadn’t previously scouted. This did not go well at all as unknown to us, a large deep ditch was waiting for us on the other side of the hedge. We ended up with both damaged equipment and damaged circle makers, but the decision was made to try and carry on.

It was then we realised that we had entered a different field to the target! Our bearings were lost a little, but we persevered with our efforts and found our way into a location where we could start. One member had damaged their foot pretty badly and was incapacitated, so we were a person down straight away.

We got the initial ring marked out and started the next part of the process. Having lost at least a good hour, it was realised that there was not enough time, or feet, to get the job done before light. So the call was made to abandon the circle.

We set off back to our vehicles, passing our originally planned entry point. The car that had held us up had gone, only to be replaced with a police vehicle. They were just parked up, awaiting their next job I guess, but we were no more than 30 feet from them, behind a fence. When we realised the situation all but one of us dived into the tramline and hit the deck, nervously trying to get a glimpse through the crop to see if there was anyone getting out of the car. The team member who didn’t drop down just suddenly took off and disappeared around the edge of the field. I can’t remember if we saw him again that night, but we were all spooked.

After about 10 minutes on the ground we started to commando crawl the tramlines and make our way back to the place we got into the field. As we got there the cop car drove off.

It would be fair to say that was not the best night. However, the experience of the team helped me a great deal. These things can happen, and sometimes things seem jinxed. It was a relief when the next opportunity came, that things did go to plan.

When thinking of my worst nights out in the field, a few definitely come to mind.

I remember a night early in my circle making career, I was in Wiltshire camping and somewhat drunk and decided I wanted to make a circle. I was all on my own but so what? I’d made circles solo before. Come darkness I set off to the nearest field with my gear and got to work. In short the night was a disaster. Not only did my circle end up seriously wonky, not only was the scale I’d opted to work at completely unfeasible for one person, but the pole I was using to hold centre came loose and it was impossible to get it back into its original position. The circle looked absolutely awful though thankfully nobody knew it was anything to do with me. Moral of the story; alcohol and circle making are not a good combination.

Any night a circle goes wrong is never fun. One can of course reconfigure the design as one goes and only the maker knows what the original design was supposed to look like, but attempting to salvage a circle in the field as the hours of darkness tick away is always a hassle. I remember one night we misread a tape measure and miscalculated the perimeter radius of a design, which meant we had to completely rejig the centre elements on the fly to be able to fit them in. We were winging it totally. The circle came out not looking very good I have to say, and not one to be proud of. I never claim circles and so nobody knows who made that one, which is probably for the best. One to be swiftly forgotten about.

I remember another night some years earlier when a circle went wrong, and as we were trying to figure out the best way to salvage it the heavens opened up and a torrential downpour ensued which didn’t let up until dawn. Fixing a botched circle in a monsoon ranks as one of my worst circle making nights ever for certain.

Oilseed rape circles are always hard work to make, and some of my worst or least enjoyable nights involve the dreaded yellow stuff. There’s a reason why a lot of circle makers avoid it completely. I’ve had nights where the crop was a foot or two taller than me, and even marking out lines – which half the time are impossible to find afterwards – or stomping was a serious physical slog. That stuff can be like a jungle, dense and thick and impenetrable. And don’t even get me started on maize. I’ll never be going there again.

Any night somebody you don’t know wanders into the field out of the blue is never a good one either. Another season, another night, we’d put down the centre circle and the perimeter and were about to start marking out the rest when we heard a group of people – how many we weren’t sure but there were at least several – coming into the field. We hid and watched but they showed no sign of going anywhere. We had to gather up all our equipment, scour the formation for all the markers we’d put down and make sure we picked them all up, and leave the field as quietly and quickly as we could, all the while knowing they could be on us at any second. On a similar night a few seasons earlier we were marking out a design and heard voices talking. We had no idea who or where they were but if we could hear them so clearly they could probably hear us. Again we made ourselves scarce. It’s always such an anticlimax too and a waste of the night, of one’s time, expenses, and effort, when you just want to get a circle down and the circle making gods and/or field pixies throw obstacles in your way.

Very early in my time as a circle maker I spent an hour or so in a field of oilseed rape with someone who was reasonably well known among croppies. I’ll call him D. This person wanted to try circle making for research purposes and we agreed to go out together. We didn’t really have a design; we’d just make a few simple circles and leave it at that.

I realised early on that D wasn’t the full ticket. We parked up in a layby next to a field of cows as we waited for it to get dark. D started to get snappy because he was convinced Gary King and Lucy Pringle were in the field looking for circle makers. I didn’t help by laughing at this totally ludicrous idea, and D only began to relax once he’d reclined his seat and thought himself out of view. When it was time to go, D suggested I abandon my planned parking space in favour of driving into the field to pull up in a hollow that would conceal us from any passers by. I was shocked that he knew so much about this specific location but went along with it.

We walked into a field of very tall oilseed rape that was around seven feet high in places. The going was extremely challenging and D went back seven or eight metres to the centre of the circle for a water break. I wondered if he was trying to avoid the last of the stomping. I carried on but could hear D mumbling aloud to himself. I initially suspected he was on the phone, but I’m sure he had both hands on his water bottle and there was no glow of a screen. I turned to thinking D was so nervous he was repeating a mantra to calm his nerves. Then I heard snatches of him saying what sounded like my name, as well as his own, in the third person. It was like he was commentating on a sports event.

Things start to race through your mind in weird situations like that. Am I being filmed? Is D making a voice recording? Is D even who he says he is? Then I noticed a beam of red light flitting over the tops of the plants. At one point it stopped extremely close to D and my kit bag. It was a misshapen red circle that was probably the width of my hand in size. Looking back now, I think it was a laser beam fired down at us from the side of the hill we were under. It had lost its intensity and spread out. It then disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived, having been on us for at least 30 seconds. Not long after, I noticed the light was now rapidly scanning areas closer to the hillside in a haphazard fashion. It’s not always simple to spot a laser beam’s source and I had no success when I tried. No matter who was in control of the light, and why they were running it over the crop, there was some chance we’d been seen.

I wanted out, so I stopped and crept over to D. He was eerily calm and told me we couldn’t go until we’d finished, otherwise the public would know our work was a hoax. He had no concern that we’d possibly been spotted. I knew I’d only take two intense minutes to finish the stomping, so I ran back to my plank. As I downed the crop closer to D, he suddenly became very loud and excited; ‘Cover me in it. Cover me in it! That’s it, you’ve got to cover me in it. Don’t worry about me. Just cover me in it.’ He was barking and shouting manically.

What the hell was I hearing? Half of the county had probably heard D’s weird innuendo and I’d had enough. I don’t think he was trying to be funny or sexual with his words, but I was in fear of D’s sudden loudness, unpredictability and the thought we’d been seen from afar. I rapidly knocked down the plants around D who was oohing and aahing and loving every second. I told him we needed to leave quickly.

Arriving back at the vehicle, we loaded in our gear and began to pull away with the sidelights on. D seemed as high as a kite, but then inexplicably shouted ‘Stop, stop!’, undid his seatbelt and hopped out. I thought he was going to be sick, or was concerned I was going to flatten a small animal that was in our path, but D was standing still, leant over. He wandered around for a few seconds, poking at the ground and putting his hands to the side of his face. I didn’t have time for this bullshit, so I got out, went over to D and asked if he was okay. ‘The ground is falling away,’ he replied and held onto my arm, ‘the ground is falling away, it’s collapsing.’ I told him we still had enough time to escape if we left there and then. I think he was crying.

Driving back to our initial meeting place, D was extremely quiet and had a blank stare on his face. I had never been so happy to see someone leave my vehicle before. The night’s events caused me a fair bit of concern and left me with a ton of questions buzzing around in my mind. Today, I think two unrelated events took place. Someone was up on the hill fooling around with a laser. They may have seen us. Or maybe they saw my car from the hillside and became curious. I honestly don’t know. Meanwhile, D was having some kind of episode. The way things unfolded that night was both worrying and thoroughly bizarre. The experience belonged in some weird psychological thriller. Whatever the truth, I haven’t been back in that field since then and I have no intention of returning.

After resting for the winter, it is always a shock to get back out for that first circle. These are always a worry for me as there can be no practice run beforehand. For this particular season, we had picked a great location and a great design for our opener, but something just didn’t feel right about the whole thing. I didn’t have a great feeling about it, even though I was looking forward to the occasion.

It became clear early on that my doubts were well founded. One of our team turned up late and got lost in the field trying to find us, so we were already a person down. The crop was a lot tougher and stickier than we expected so the going became very slow. Then the rain started and we had three tapes snap, along with one of our stompers. We reached that point where it was obvious we just weren’t going to get the planned design down, but we muddled on until we could leave a reasonable crop circle behind us. Nobody outside of our team would know any better.

We went through the usual routine of gathering our equipment up in the field and started to make our way out as quickly and as quietly as possible. Hoods up, heads down. Just as we got to the edge of the field, one of the team reached into his coat pocket to check his car keys were still there. He had them in his hand for one second and then they went onto the ground. He was fumbling around on the floor before asking for help. It’s a horrible experience when people are poking around between plant stems at the end of a long night when everyone is tired. I’ve seen it happen before with items of clothing. The darkness is fading and your brain isn’t working as quickly as you want it to. Eventually, the keys were found, but immediately afterwards there was a big commotion. One of the team fell forwards and lay still. Then he began rolling around on the floor in pain and couldn’t get to his feet. Nobody could really work out what had happened, but we realised we had to get them out of the field as quickly as possible with first light approaching. That’s really not an easy job when someone is crying with extreme pain and shivering as they go into shock.

Fortunately, one team member was able to run back to their vehicle, and we started the slow process of carrying our injured teammate to the roadside. Even when he was there it left us with a massive problem: it was that time of morning when some early risers are up and about. Had a car driven past, he’d have been spotted on the verge of a road and have to answer some awkward questions. It was a terrifying moment when a Land Rover came up the main road but, thankfully, didn’t turn off in our direction. The next vehicle that arrived was one we recognised. We still had that nerve-wracking period of time when we bundled our teammate into the front passenger seat and loaded our equipment into the boot. Half-way back to safety, one of us then started to question if we’d left a stomper behind. Going back wasn’t under consideration and we had to put the matter out of our minds until we could check our equipment.

Our teammate eventually found his way to hospital and was told he’d broken his leg. He had to sit out the entire season. One of us returned to the field a week later to try and work out what had happened. They found a short loop of old barbed wire embedded firmly into the ground. Our team member must have put their foot into it and fallen forwards. Their body kept moving whilst their foot was jammed in place. It was a horrible night for everyone.

The worst night was a consequence of my own stupidity. I’m that idiot who became a circle maker despite having severe hay fever in the spring months. I also knew that if I took a hat, a change of clothes and antihistamines with me then I’d be able to manage my allergy once I’d left the field. On one occasion, I managed to leave my bag containing these items at home, although I didn’t realise it until I’d trudged a long distance to my vehicle, well away from the circle we’d messed up and hoped would never get found. In hindsight, I couldn’t have forgotten my stuff on a worse night: it was hot and the crop was shedding a lot of pollen. Of course, with every step and stomp through it, the pollen just gets thrown up into the air around you.

It’s one thing being out in the open, but in my van I was sitting in a cloud of pollen that was in my hair and all over my clothes. After a couple of minutes my eyes started to partially close and weep goo. Then I started to cough and sneeze. About half an hour from home I suddenly started to feel extremely nauseous and my head began to spin. I managed to get the van onto a side road, pull over and was hoping to get out and throw up. Instead, I managed to only open my door before I blacked out.

I woke up halfway out of the door but caught up in my seatbelt. I was covered in my vomit and my trousers were full of my own shit, but I was more aware of the gruff male voice that was calling ‘Hello, hello, don’t move,’ to me. I saw a pair of extremely skinny stockinged legs and a short metallic-blue skirt close to me, and felt a gentle hand on my shoulder. I concluded the voice was either someone else’s or I was delirious and confused. I snapped out of it when the hand moved to my chin and a wiry bald man with ‘FUCK ME’ written in lipstick across his forehead looked into my eyes and asked if I was okay. He explained that he was an off-duty paramedic and had just happened to be driving by on his way home from a party. He stayed with me for a good while until I was able to drive on. Even then, he followed me for ten or so miles to make sure I was okay. I don’t know who he was but I genuinely still appreciate the kindness and care he afforded me in what may have been an embarrassing situation for him. It was my own fault I was in such a state and I’d basically wasted that man’s time.

The following morning I awoke but thought I’d gone blind because I couldn’t see anything. I started to panic but then realised the discharge from my eyes had effectively glued them shut. I spent the rest of the day in bed wheezing and coughing so badly my ribs began to hurt. Despite having rinsed my eyes out in the shower, the irritation to them caused conjunctival chemosis. This is when the whites of your eyes essentially become fluid filled blisters. It took days for the swelling in and around my eyes to go down.

I am reasonably philosophical about how things unfolded that night. I quickly concluded that you cannot even consider making a crop circle unless you have triple-checked that you are taking everything with you that you will need to be comfortable before, during and after the task. I suppose the only genuinely good thing that came from the whole affair was that the circle we’d fouled up never got discovered!