2025: When The Lunatics Took Over

We doubt any of you ever expected our 2025 review to make it online. At the end of that most forgettable—and sometimes completely pathetic—season we decided we needed a break from crop circles. Not a permanent closure, but just some time to reflect on our perspective of the circles and everything that goes on around them. We took the opportunity and returned, albeit nervously. Thankfully, an improved 2026 meant we finally felt ready to reflect on the circus that was the 2025 mess.

In short, genuine, unclaimed crop circles largely failed to appear. Just six of them showed up (more of them later) and were outweighed by the hoaxed efforts of Team Ten Watt and their collective mouths.

We knew what was coming in April when a ringed circle arrived in oilseed rape, not far from the Dorset home of Deiniol ‘Dan’ Davies, a low-grade member of the south-west hoaxing unintelligentsia. As if by chance, his lapdog with a drone, Mark ‘Billy’ Breen, appeared to record everything. By incredible coincidence, Davies and his hoaxing ‘mentor’, Dene Hine, were standing in close proximity to the circle. We guess they just happened to be there. Shameless.

The following month, the Ten Watt crew were at it again, weirdly choosing to put their work in the worst corner of another Dorset field where the crop was both springy and sparse. It stank of laziness, as did the choice of design, one which Hine had previously used as his Facebook profile image.

Funnily enough, they put in more effort when working in some capacity with ‘psychedelic artist’ Harry Pack to put down a representation of a goblin type thing. It looked ridiculous, though the collective brain cell was on a mission to make sure it got reported to the Crop Circle Connector as a genuine formation rather than a hoax, commissioned piece or ‘rumour’. An anonymous email made its way to the Connector who guessed something was up and sat on the location. Of course, purely by luck yet again, Mark ‘Billy’ Breen made his way to the exact field and filmed the piece. Just how did he know it was there? Whilst we don’t know if any money changed hands between Pack and his mate Hine, it would be disappointing to think that a commissioned piece would have been made illegally at the farmer’s expense.

Look familiar? The Cerne Abbas wonky spider, 2025.

After this, the Ten Watt collective slipped back into their lazy ways. A shoddy, wobbly representation of eight burning candle wicks disgraced Kingsdon in Somerset. It’s remarkable Hine made it into the field as just a few days previously he publicly announced yet another retirement from hoaxing as he’d endured a stroke. Really … What kind of twerp says that if it isn’t so?

June concluded with an ‘S’ shaped disaster (one which we described as ‘a circle so bad that anyone who defends it must either be completely delusional, living with poor eyesight or part of the clique of those responsible for the mess.’) at Charlton in Wiltshire, and a drab version of the CND logo on a hillside overlooking the Glastonbury Festival. It says a lot that Hine has subsequently used an image of him standing in this circle as a kind of boast, accompanied by the hilariously deluded caption ‘Outstanding in my field’. That field, lad, no other.

Things slumped to a new low in early July, with the appearance of two small circles at Littleton, Somerset: one plain and one with a basket weave effect, both positioned on different sides of a field boundary.

How the arrival of the Littleton biscuits was announced, via the hoaxers’ Facebook group.

Then, whether through hubris or plain stupidity, the Ten Watt crew marched into a field at Cerne Abbas in Dorset and put down a lopsided version of a design Deiniol Davies had previously posted on Facebook. Not even Breen fancied it on this occasion though, with the hoax being discovered by a friend of Davies’ who, predictably, just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

For once Breen had the right idea as, for all of the cocky silliness that started to come from the Ten Watt camp, Hine and co. quickly went to ground once it became known that the farmer had contacted Dorset Police. And that was the end of their season, hiding under their beds until the harvest was in.

As for the real deal, things began in May with a small, tidy knot design that was beautifully positioned between trees in a natural amphitheatre at Sutton Veney in Wiltshire. The farmer’s annoyance subsided once they realised they could allow paying visitors to enter. We imagine they turned in quite a reasonable profit, especially as the circle was open to tourists for a lengthy period. This was followed by a ten-fold formation opposite West Kennett Avenue, near Avebury, in June that seemed to resemble something from a technical manual.

Falkner’s Circle, nr Avebury, 2025. Photo by Hannah Kathleen

The farmer here was not so patient, swiftly removing the circle after an evening’s grace. Nonetheless, it was rewarding to see a formation back in the fields of this most sacred landscape. This was followed up by a ringed quintuplet at Hackpen Hill and an equally retro formation at Lyme Regis, on the Devon-Dorset border, that had fascinating echoes of sliced fruit on a platter. Positioned on a hilltop overlooking the sea, it is hard to recall any other circle locations in recent years that have been as unusual and beautiful.

Lyme Regis, 2025. Photograph by Nick Bull

June passed through into July and a Pagan-style ‘triple goddess’, bearing a central pentagram with similarities to the Sutton Veny ‘knot’, was reported from Ludwell. That was it from Wiltshire, a premature, flat end. The only subsequent interest came in the shape of footprints under the Long Man at Wilmington in East Sussex, a formation we held suspicions about.

Wilmington Long Man 2025. Photograph by Barry Reynolds.

It was an underwhelming end for a season as terrible as any we can remember, one where hoaxes outweighed the unclaimed, real thing.

As we mused following the Littleton sham:

‘Is this really where we have come? Team Ten Watt spending twenty minutes in a field and sharing the results as if they’re something special? For anyone to do anything other than laugh at the players involved and their dismal effort reveals how desperate the public has become.

‘This last week has left us feeling rather depressed with the whole scene, to be perfectly honest. No, we will go further and say we are embarrassed. The current state of things represents what happens when the real circle makers have decided most of their time is best spent away from the fields. We’re left with chimpanzees who believe they can take over the abandoned zoo, and because nobody else is offering anything they can have the run of the place. Years of history and knowledge come tumbling down to be replaced by entry level mark making.’

If there was any consolation it was that there was still good out there. Just not much.