FARM manager Jack Torrens is stomping through a pungent field of oilseed rape and having a good old rant. “We’re fed up with this every year,” he is fuming down a mobile phone at this reporter. “What they have done is irresponsible….there is nothing magical about it.”

In an office around 15 miles away Dereka Dodson, however, begged to differ. “Yes I’ve seen it - it’s beautiful isn’t it,” she beamed. “Quite magnificent.”

The object of Mr Torrens’ ire and Ms Dodson’s delight is an “agriglyph”…..a six petalled specimen that has materialised, by some sorcery, on half-an-acre of golden-yellow Wiltshire countryside.

Once more, shrugged Mr Torrens, it’s going to cost him……last year’s damage was around £2,000. So no, he won’t be letting the mob onto the farm for a gander. There will be no access here, he proclaims.

The mob are the “croppies” – the followers of this bewildering phenomenon, the ones who, legally or sometimes illegally, trample through fields of green and gold to experience the electricity, the mystic vibe and the sheer otherworldliness at the heart of a “genuine” crop formation.

My brief chat with Mr Torrens, who farms near Marlborough, took place ten years ago virtually to the day, hailing the commencement of the annual four month crop circle season, as it always does around mid-May.

He had awoken to discover this annoyingly immense and artful formation in the midst of his rapeseed - a mischievous and reckless act of vandalism, barked the down-to-earth farmer.

At the Wiltshire Crop Circle Study Group (WCCSG) in Devizes, however, a different point of view was being proffered.

It was early doors, sure, but Ms Dodson felt the year’s first formation was genuine – in other words, the “temporary temple” wasn’t fashioned by hoaxers.

Who then fabricated this startling work of pop-up earth art? Good question. While many are attributed to the nocturnal activities of wily pranksters others remain the subject of the sort of heated conjecture usually reserved for ghostly apparitions and UFOs.

The first recorded crop circle was the handiwork of “The Mowing Devil.” We know this because a 1674 pamphlet, ‘Strange News out of Hartfordshire” (correct) said so.

Intermittent grain pattern reports arose over the next 300 years, including a 1963 probe by astronomer general Sir Patrick Moore into some mysterious Wiltshire circles.

Tricksters, Mother Nature, aliens and hedgehogs (see panel) were all offered as possible perpetrators as these inexplicable, intriguing motifs began to multiply during the Late Seventies and early Eighties.

Ufologists and meteorologists expounded and published their theories. Researcher Colin Andrews coined the phrase “crop circle.”

The morning of July 12, 1990, however, was a game-changer, according to expert and author Freddy Silva.

A loud rumbling of thunder, incessant howling of dogs and a mysterious power surge that left car batteries dead were the harbinger of something extraordinary…a 606ft “pictogram” on farmland adjoining Alton Barnes in the Pewsey Valley.

No-one anywhere had seen anything like this vast, inter-connected arrangement of circles, rings, boxes and tridents. When a TV crew entered the formation their equipment apparently went haywire.

Could an artful band of Banksy-like hoodwinkers armed with planks and ropes create such a huge and intricate work under the cloak of darkness?

Narrow rural lanes were soon clogged with sightseers keen to acquaint themselves with this wondrous pattern of wheat known as the Alton Barnes Pictogram. Inside, people gaped, danced and hugged in a carnival-like atmosphere.

An industry, in effect, was born. Wiltshire and Hampshire, where most of the world’s crop patterns appear, acquired their own Loch Ness Monster.

Patterns of flattened crops that briefly enriched swathes of cereal, rapeseed, reeds and grass grew increasingly elaborate, geometrical, sophisticated and photogenic.

Heptagons, pentagons, hexagons, pentagrams, snowflakes, serpentines, diamonds, compasses, asteroids, sieves, triangles, spirals and stars all fleetingly furnished the Wiltshire countryside between May and August.

“An unmistakable air of mystery” clung to Wiltshire during the crop pattern season, wrote Andy Thomas, author of the An Introduction to Crop Circles (2003.)

It would be no exaggeration to say that some of the most dramatic shapes to have appeared in rural Britain have been crop formations…and many were bang on Swindon’s doorstep.

They are, to quote crop circle author Nick Kolerstorm (correct), “great unclaimed masterpieces,” many of them truly exquisite in their detail, complexity and ornamentation.

Some of the phrases used to describe them are almost as dynamic as the patterns themselves: “a gigantic cereological necklace strung with diamonds,” is a personal favourite.

Crop circle author Karen Alexander was moved to suggest: “Perhaps for the first time since the creation of ancient temples, stone circles and great cathedrals a new window upon another realm is being opened.”

They also became a cash crop: study and research groups were formed, websites created, crop circle tours materialised, helicopters rides were on offer, and glossy books and calendars bulging with mouth-watering aerial shots were published.

A roaring trade was enjoyed by bed and breakfast establishments in the croppy heartland of the Marlborough/Pewsey Vale area. The Barge at Honeystreet became Crop Circle Central. A petrol station at Cherhill morphed into a croppy café-cum-information centre.

The popularity of the X Files – let’s face it, we all fascinated by The Unknown – helped feed the beast.

Keen to heed Government advice on diversification perhaps, some farmers charged visitors a couple of quid to wander into their crop enhanced fields.

It was from the sky, however, that their sheer majesty could be appreciated.

“It’s a glorious pattern – a sort of triple yin and yang. Very simple but quite stunning,” experienced crop hunter Lucy Pringle told me in May, 2008 having just clambered out of her light aircraft after swooping over Avebury and Westbury.

“Lucy in the Sky” was convinced the magnificent patterns she has just photographed were created from a microwave effect in which the field was bombarded, for the merest hint of a nanosecond, with hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity from the ionosphere.

Either that or some very canny “cereal artists” with planks, bamboo poles, ropes, garden rollers, surveyor’s measuring tape, protractors, night vision goggles and laser pointers were at it again.

PANEL ONE:

FROM extra-terrestrials to rutting hedgehogs…..some bizarre and amusing crop circle theories have been tended over the years.

None more so than the copulating creatures punt whereby the amorous escapades of our prickly friends had caused the formations during some obscure mating dance.

Having been shot into space by scientists, some ufologists still believe patterns were created by alien activity.

Giant hail-stones, ley-lines and the hole in the Ozone Layer have all been suggested and rebuffed.

While the more elaborate formations are clearly the result of human mischief, others are said to be “genuine.”

Invisible, unknown force-fields, “eddies of wind,” ball lightning and space weather have been suggested, as has “electromagneto-hydrodynamic plasma vortexes.”

Best leave it to Stephen Hawkings who in 1991 said: “Corn circles are either hoaxes or formed by vortex movements of air.”