2025 Circles: The Gallops, Sutton Veny, Wiltshire
DETAILS
Date Reported: 15 May 2025
Location: The Gallops, Sutton Veny, nr. Warminster, Wiltshire
Just when we thought it would be a week or so until the barley fields of southern England would be able to hold a crop circle, a new formation has been put down close to the little village of Sutton Veny, near Warminster.
Being unfamiliar with this little corner of Wiltshire, the first thing we’ve noticed from the photographs is the stunning nature of the location and the circle’s position between two clusters of trees. It reminds us a little of the position of the formation at Chute Causeway in 2022.
What’s really positive is that nobody is running their mouth that they made it. Neither was Mark ‘Billy’ Breen first to the scene.
Just visited this, and I have to say this has to be one of the poorest attempts at faking a crop circle purely for financial gain. It’s not donations of an advised £10 , it’s a ticket price of £10 per person to look at a extremely crude example of a crop formation, hence why not one photo demonstrating the view from inside the circle on the ground, as all it looks like is a herd of cows have had a good run around! If this is the level of technology that the extraterrestrials have at there disposal then we needn’t worry about conflict with them in the future as we could wipe em out with sticks and stones if this is anything to go by! Total scam, worth a visit for a laugh I guess but just do what me and my partner did, donate £0!
Hi James, thanks for your comment and you raise some interesting points. I’ll address each, albeit in an out of synch order:
1. The reason why we haven’t posted any photographs from ground level of the crop circle is simply that we haven’t visited it. Even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t pay the £10 admission fee the farmer is asking for. More on that in a minute.
2. Barley crop circles can indeed look like a herd of cows have had a run through. At this time of the year, barley is extremely supple and phototropism is likely to make it start standing back up in an extremely uneven and disorderly manner. This actually used to be considered a sign of a circle’s ‘genuineness’, which just goes to show how authenticity is very much in the eye of the beholder.
3. I genuinely do not believe the farmer has played any part in the appearance of this crop circle on their land. Believe me, if any farmer was to invite circle makers to work on their land, they would face quite a backlash. It’s one thing having a crop circle on your land and attempting to exploit it, it’s another to invite a circle maker into your fields in order to help you make some money. The last time we saw anything like that was the Ansty commission in 2016 and we weren’t shy in calling out the farmer for attempting to conceal the piece’s true origins.
4. None of this is to say the farmer has got things right in how they have handled this situation. Asking people to pay £10 to visit what is, when the outside ring is removed, a very small crop circle, is a big ask. I think £3-£5 would be far more reasonable. At first, I thought the £10 was deliberately high in a bid to stop people visiting. However, the farmer has now posted a GoFundMe appeal aiming to raise £6,800 to cover the cost of damage to the crop. It is laughable. If you look at a site such as https://ahdb.org.uk/cereals-oilseeds/ex-farm-prices-summary you can see the true cost of malting barley. If we say that malting barley is £200 per tonne of grain, are they really trying to tell us they’ve lost 34 tonnes? That’s fantasy land. (The average yield is about 8 tonnes per hectare, which is 100m x 100m, but this circle has nowhere near that area flattened.) Maybe it’s deliberate greed, maybe they’ve panicked and vastly overestimated how much crop has been downed. The irony here is that phototropism will ensure a lot of that downed crop is harvestable!