The following article appeared in the Reading-Evening Post
on August 4th 1994 :
Corn Fairies played tricks in the 1920s
Crop circles have been around for at least 100 years, according to a Reading woman. The claim comes after circles were discovered recently on a farmer's field at Ipsden near Reading. Constance Wheeler, 78, of [address deleted], remembers the mysterious patterns being discovered in the 1920s when she lived in Wiltshire. This contradicts the belief repeated in the media that they started appearing about a decade ago. But Mrs Wheeler said they were known as fairy circles at the time because no one knew who made them.
She said 'I was eight years old when I first heard of fairy circles. My uncle, Teddy Lawes, came into tea laughing. It was a Thursday market day and he had been with his farmer friends at the Bear Hotel in Devizes market place. There they had met a farmer who had been swearing like a trooper because he had found four big circles and some small ones in his corn'. The farmer was shouting what he would do with the person who had made them. But Mr Lawes told him jokingly he would never catch them because the fairies had made them. He explained that he had seen a spate of them 20 years previously and his family had tried to make the corn stand up again but could not. Mrs Wheeler said 'I do not know what causes corn circles. I do not believe in fairies myself but I believe the circles existed 70, even 100, years ago'."
(courtesy, Reading Evening Post.)
This superb account immediately suggests parallels with the
numerous other claims of historical crop circles which have been
published in the literature. To take just one example compare
this account with the claim published by Andy Collins in The
Circlemakers (pages 104-5). As a child of six Gwen Horrigan
recalls seeing "fairy rings" at Whitequarry Hill near
Kingham on the Oxfordshire/Gloucest-ershire border during the
early years of the Second World War (page 104-5). The circles
were up to 50 feet in diameter and exhibited swirl patterns and
sharp cut-off edges. The Kingham circles were associated by local
people with fairy lights seen in a local wood, which was said to
be frequented by a witches coven. In 1960, less than 3 kms from
this location, two concentric rings were found on Bill Edward's
farm at nearby Evenlode.
It seems significant that both these cases involved circles
which were described as "fairy rings" but which did NOT
involve fungal growths. In both cases the witnesses were emphatic
that they were describing flattened corn laid down in circles or
rings. In both cases the witnesses describe the fact that the
crop was pressed down very firmly - something which other
witnesses to historical crop circles have mentioned in their
accounts. Bob Rickard and Andy Collins have both wondered whether
circular fungal growths and crop circles have both been lumped
together into one common folklore motif - the fairy ring. Doug
Bower's admission on Cropcircle Communique II that natural
lodging can frequently look very much like the crop circles he
and Dave Chorley began making in the mid 1970s again lends
credence to the idea that we have a masking effect, one which
might be capable of obscuring the existence of the rare crop
circles which have been reported by numerous people who have come
forward to report historical cases. For the official Skeptics the
existence of this most unwelcome evidence continues to be brushed
aside as irrelevant.
This is one of the primary reasons why The Crop Watcher
exists - to continue researching and publishing evidence which
other researchers seem so uncomfortable with.
On November 26th 1994 I visited Constance Wheeler to find out
more about this important historical case. Constance was born in
1916 and lived until she was 11 with her two uncles, Edward and
William Lawes, and her two aunts, Kathleen and Margaret Lawes, at
Craven House in Devizes. Her mother had secret aspirations to
become a teacher and, with the help of a local clergyman, she
secretly took a correspondence course at Reading University.
Eventually she passed her exams and went to live and teach at the
Pigott School at Wargrave near Reading. In those days it was
almost unheard of for young women from rural farming communities
to leave home and work elsewhere. In 1918 Constance was sent to
live with her uncles and aunts when her brother was born.
Originally it was intended that she should only stay for three
weeks but her uncles and aunts had no children of their own and
doted on her. They pleaded with Constance's mother to allow her
to stay a little longer, and as this seemed to suit everyone
concerned, the arrangement continued.
Constance's uncle "Teddy" Lawes was an important
figure in the Devizes area in the 1920s and 1930s. He was an
auctioneer at Devizes market place as well as an estate agent and
a property valuer. He was in partnership with Harry Ferris and
must have been an imposing figure, weighing in at 17 stone.
During the depression years Teddy Lawes valued many farms which
went bankrupt in the Devizes area.
Constance was probably eight years old when the corn circles
appeared. This dates the event to August 1924 (during the school
holidays). Unfortunately although Constance was fascinated when
she learnt of the appearance of the circles, her intention to
visit them was thwarted by a great storm which lashed down the
crop and destroyed most of the evidence. For this reason
Constance never saw the corn circles herself, but it is clear
from her story that her two aunts and uncles did. Unfortunately
they are no longer alive to question, but Constance recalled with
great clarity the events of that summer as this was the first
time she had ever heard of "fairy" circles. She
particularly remembers asking her Aunt Kathleen about the
circles. Apparently Aunty Kathleen replied that "We haven't
heard of these (circles) for years".
The circles appeared at Great Cheverell - within a couple of
miles of Melvyn Bell's 1983 observation of a whirlwind creating a
corn circle - and the precise location was probably on a farm
owned by a Mr Shepherd. Unfortunately the Reading Evening Post
article confuses Constance's description of the 1924 event with
an earlier event recalled by her Aunty Kathleen (see below) but
Constance recalls quite clearly that her uncles and aunts
examined two quite large rings in an unknown crop (probably
wheat). Like many modern circles the heads of the crop were
undamaged and there was no indication that the rings were
man-made. Unfortunately Constance does not recall any mention of
how sharply defined the rings were but she was adamant that
according to her aunts all the crop pointed in one direction.
I questioned Constance very carefully about how her relatives
tried to rationalise the "fairy circles". According to
her uncles and aunts, no one knew how the rings were made and it
was a complete mystery to everyone in the local community. By
contrast the farmer, Mr Shepherd, was convinced that the rings
were made by vandals and - as the Reading Evening Post
article suggests - he was very angry and knew exactly what he
would do if he caught them ! Apparently no one ever came under
suspicion for having made the circles and no prosecutions were
ever bought. According to Constance Wheeler Teddy Lawes did
consider it possible that the rings were made by a whirlwind but
this was no more than a guess.
Unfortunately the Reading Evening Post article
mistakenly attributes the "fairy ring" explanation to
Constance's uncle, Teddy Lawes. However, the claim had actually
been made by an Irish tinker who had briefly worked in the
district. His suggestion that Shepherd would never catch the
fairies who made the circles on his land was treated as a joke by
everyone concerned.
I questioned Constance carefully about some of the claims that
have been made about rural superstitions which have been linked
by some writers with the crop circle phenomenon. She recalls
nothing to support the claim that crop circles were believed to
be dangerous to enter or were associated with the Devil. In her
opinion they were just viewed as an unusual local mystery.
As a child of eight Constance was naturally very curious about
the crop rings and she eagerly pressed her aunts and uncles for
more information about the fairy circles they recalled from
earlier years. This earlier event took place some twenty years
previously - around the turn of the century - and is also
referred to in the Reading Evening Post article. This
event occurred on Constance's grandfather's farm - known to the
family as Lawes' Farm, but which was was also called Cornbury
Farm. This farm is still located near Tilshead in the middle of
Salisbury Plain and retains its name to this date (OSGR SU
005499). The earlier event involved six rings in wheat which
almost touched each other. Constance recalled her aunt's
description of the crop being laid down "in perfect
rings" which looked as though they had been "made by a
compass" - exactly the same description used by John
Llewellyn to describe the double rings he saw at Evenlode,
Gloucestershire, in June 1960. The rings were laid out in a line
and the four larger rings were adjacent to eachother at one end
of the formation.
Cornbury Farm is only four miles south of Great Cheverell and
is surrounded by the rolling downland of Salisbury Plain. The
Cornbury Farm rings were not as big as those which featured in
the 1924 event but were as big as a room - perhaps 15 feet or
more in diameter. Constance's aunt recalls that they tried to
lift the fallen wheat with walking sticks and umbrellas but it
had been flattened so hard that whenever the crop was lifted it
flopped down again.
Constance moved to Reading during the 1930s and for many years
was employed as a civil servant in the Ministry of Works at
Whiteknights Park, Reading.
Constance Wheeler told her story to the Reading Evening
Post because although she didn't know what caused the circles
recalled from her childhood she wanted to contradict media claims
that corn circles first appeared about a decade ago. It seems
quite astonishing in the light of numerous repeated consistent
claims like this that the official Skeptics continue to claim
that crop circles are "new" and have no reliable
historical precedents. It seems even more astonishing that the
same motifs - the association of the circles with the fairy folk
- should arise in both the Gwen Horrigan case and the Constance
Wheeler case. With coincidences like this we are surely dealing
with consistent accounts of a rare natural phenomenon. In the
1920s life in rural England was hard and it would have been
unlikely that locals would have made crop circles for a game. It
is important to remember that both these events occurred many
years before the invention of the flying saucer mythology in 1947
so if, for sake of argument, these events were both the product
of hoaxers, the only supernatural mythology available to them
would have been the Irish tinker's "fairy" rings.
Looking through the UFO Research Manitoba database there are
several historical accounts of multiple ring formations dating
back to the 1960s which are comparable to the earlier account by
Constance Wheeler. In 1967 seven flattened rings appeared in a
grass field at Duhamel, Alberta (Canada) . The rings were 10
metres in diameter and 15 cms wide. That same year six concentric
rings were discovered in a wheat field at Willen, Manitoba
(Canada). The rings were 3.9 metres in diameter and nearly 2
metres wide. In 1974 seven flattened rings were discovered at
Langenburg, Saskatchewan, in a field of grass. The rings varied
between 3 and 4 metres in diameter and were 46 cms wide. Readers
will recall that this was the controversial UFO case discussed in CW15
and IUR volume 17 no 2.
Both the earlier case and the 1924 case discussed above formed
on or near rolling downland - one of the prerequisites for
Meaden's atmospheric vortex theory. The 1924 event took place 36
years before an eye witness claims that he saw a crop circle
being created by a whirlwind on a hot summers afternoon only a
few miles away. It is known that under stable atmospheric
conditions natural ring-shaped vortices can form which would be
perfectly capable of creating the phenomena described by
Constance Wheeler's relatives, particularly if they were located
close to hillslopes. It seems clear that these are excellent
candidates for an atmospheric explanation, although it has to be
accepted that the involvement of six almost-touching rings in the
earlier case begs important questions about how multiple ring
vortices can be generated at the same time. Our thanks go to
Constance for her courage in coming forward with this important
account.
