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I prefer the Uffington white horse, near Faringdon. There’s another one at Folkestone near the Channel Tunnel entrance.

Leucipotomy: the carving of white horses into hillsides, from leuco – meaning white, hippos – horse, tomia – a cutting.

The Uffington horse is reliably dated to the Bronze Age. Love that one.

Well I DID find something amusing. Just south of Manton Down and Kingsway (WNW of Marlborough), I was studying what appears to be racing “straights” —I don’t know what to call them. They look very organic from above. Like an agricultural company logo. But south of the track there’s a “crop image” that looks like a cross between a trefoil and the biohazard symbol. Definitely alienistic.

Just outside of Wroughton (SSW)I found a weird Chi Rho cross in the ground. 😉 And what are all those odd white scrapes on the ground. They are about 100 ft. long and 10-15 ft wide. Scattered all over.

Wow! That’s some estate at Kingways.

Leucipotomy. You know, it had not previously occurred to me (ignorant, uninformed, and ill-educated colonial that I am) that there was precedent for Mount Rushmore, Stone Mountain, and the Crazy Horse Memorial.

About crop circles, it’s actually pretty entertaining figuring out just how you’d deploy the boards to create them; the pipe is a nice touch requiring, as it does, a somewhat different technique.

Differential GPS is great for making crop circles. It beats screwing around in the dark with marker sticks that you can lose and give the game away.

I’ll just bet farmers simply LUV getting their cash crops trampled by these morons.

Yes, you have to be careful …. they dooo shoot. In the dark – you could be mistaken for being a ‘blackie’ – especially after the riots ….

I’m thinking of a new circle …. ‘Osambo in the Rye’ … hmmmm

Deborah’s biohazard symbol us here. The three lines crossing in a star pattern near Wroughton (which is what I assume you mean) is an airstrip. You can tell by the compass heading painted at each end. Used to be an RAF base. Closed in the 60’s. Now it’s part of the Swindon Science Museum.

The White Horse is mentioned in Tom Brown’s School Days.

I’m glad I’m not the only one brave enough to criticise Stubbs’ deformed horses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adk1ujjmguo

There’s what looks like a corporate logo mown into the grass here.

You can find all kinds of fun things and shapes in the earth starting from something like a white horse or a stone circle.

Stubbs did some really interesting comparative anatomy drawings, Jannie, but his horses are just…ewww.

Only G & H that immediately springs to mind is Gieves and Hawkes (Uncle B. being a badger of discernment will know whereof I speak,) and surely they wouldn’t be so crass.

Here’s yer Folkestone gee-gee, by the way. I like it. It has a nod to the Uffington horse but is somehow more ‘modern’ (not an art critic, sorry, can’t speak the lingo.)

As for horses, wasn’t it Munnings who was one of the first to really get them right? Like I said, not an art critic, but I did read a Dick Francis book where this came up, so sue me. I do know that a bet on whether horses have all four feet off the ground in a gallop led directly to early high speed film techniques (q.v. Muybridge, who was madder than a big bag full of mad things.)

Ah Weas, haven’t you seen Signs? Aliens would never use water pipes.;)

Borkum Riff is a bit rough. Grampa Ermine smoked that and VIP in a Dr. Grabow all through my youth. Rank second hand stuff from my back seat perspective in the Caprice station wagon. I bought him a decent Peterson years ago and he up and quits. Yeah, I got it back.

David, m’love, I was making a joke about the cross on the ground (xref winking weasel). But studying the English landscape from above is a fascinating exercise. I used to be a cartographic draftsman, making maps from original survey notes thence to landsat satellite imagery. Being an English surveyor must be the most exhausting job in the world.

Is that a human-size alien smoking a pipe or is it a gigantic alien blowing an alpenhorn?

This is much more civilized than what some farmer wrote on his field in Louisiana USA. Go to Google Maps, select satellite view, enter this in the search box:
30.561265,-92.021019
and then zoom in on the arrow.
NB: Shows a very naughty word.

I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords. Not only do they do neat and precise work, they have a sense of humor.

What an improvement!

There’s nothing like a pipe to make an alien seem ever so much more respectable and trustworthy. Like some vegetable, I am feeling much better about the eventual alien invasion. Here’s hoping they consider bow-ties and fezes (what’s the plural of fez?) to be “cool.”

Weasel—I looked at those stone circles last night, and completely missed the growing G & H nearby! Duh. I am also intrigued by the huge scattering of rocks north of Westdown Camp by Tilshead. Looks like something exploded down from outer space, but there’s no crater …

I do love the green corduroy fields.

completely off topic … woozle pics online!

From a news story about a whole building full of breeding black-footed ferrets in Arizona that is helping bring the species back from the very edge of extinction.

Deborah, the apparent huge scattering of rocks is simply exposed chalk. The area you are looking at is on Salisbury Plain which is chalk grassland. The topsoil is very thin or non-existent.

Much of Salisbury Plain is devoted to military training and the live firing and tank movements expose even more of the chalk.

As Weasel says, the county of Wiltshire is a very spooky place. It is crammed full of ancient sites – stone circles (e.g. Stonehenge, Avebury), hill forts, burial mounds, etc.

Mr. Stubbs doesn’t appear to have liked horses very much.

Thank you Carl. It had occurred to me that the “rocks” were blast pitting of some sort, but I couldn’t get close enough. Google is good, but not that good.

Aliens?

Which ones are referring to?

Because aliens don’t have cannaboid or nicotine receptors …

Carl – I ate chicken drumsticks from a bag lunch in a layby a few miles’ north of Salisbury with Stonehenge in the background. We were on our way to a school version of University Challenge (we owned the other team. Oh, it was humiliating.) There was nothing there. It was, literally, a bunch of Iron Age rocks in the middle of a field. Just off to the side of the A344, which isn’t even a particularly significant road. It’s like finding Chichen Itza in a cornfield ten miles outside Grinnell, Iowa. Eerie. Bill Bryson points out that Britain is so lavishly littered with antiquities that you can scarcely go a mile in any direction without seeing something that pre-dates the US (or even the European discovery of the Americas.) My sister’s house is only 300 years old or so, but she’s had people come in off the road and offer to buy it for cash. The church at the end of her lane was dedicated in 1292 (not a typo.) Some of the timbers in the rebuilt porch came from a galleon which participated in the Battle of Trafalgar. Mind-blowing when you stop to think about it.

Yeah, they make sure it doesn’t look like that in the pictures, but Stonehenge is in a fork in two busy roads. The heelstone is six feet from the highway. It’s like a flipping Texaco station.

I don’t find much magic left in Stonehenge. Avebury has got some sizzle left, though. The Uffington horse. Silbury Hill. Wayland’s Smithy. Those are still pretty powerful. The Long Man of Wilmington is cool, too.

Stubbs sure had a thing about horses and lions…
Around here, our “crop circles” tend to commemorate football players or teams – they call them corn mazes and charge you to go get lost in them. It’s just to damn hard to hire aliens to do a decent corn maze, so the farmers use GPS.