Show Notes
On a summer day in Hertfordshire in sixteen seventy-eight, a poor man who cut grass for a living ran after a farmer along a track beside three half-acres of ripe oats, to offer to do the work for less than he had asked a moment earlier. The farmer refused anyway, and said with a stern look and a hasty gesture that the Devil should mow it rather than he. That night, the pamphlet says, the field showed as if it were all of a flame, and in the morning the oats lay cut in a circle so neatly that no mortal man could do the like.
That pamphlet was printed to prove that the Devil exists. Half of it is a wage dispute, and its sympathy is with the mower.
Three hundred years later the chalk country of Wiltshire and Hampshire began waking up with drawings in it — rings, then avenues and boxes and claws, then a spiral of a hundred and fifty-one circles beside Stonehenge in the time it took a pilot to fill in his forms and refuel. Nothing was ever cut and nothing was ever taken. The wheat was laid over, bent at the joint, and left alive, so that some of it curled back up toward the sun and went on growing in the shape it had been put in.
This is the story of the people who went looking. A physicist who proposed a spinning, electrically charged vortex, wrote down the one sentence in the whole affair that could be proved wrong, and then telephoned the men who had fooled him to say he had changed his mind. A believer who took a philanthropist's money for two seasons of aircraft and magnetometers, and went on television to announce that four fifths of it was human work. A television director who put a watch on a hillside with a million pounds of borrowed equipment pointed at a wheatfield.
And two artists from Southampton — a picture framer and his friend — who had spent ten years meeting on Friday evenings to talk about watercolours before one of them said, why don't we put a circular depression in this cornfield. They worked for thirteen years with a plank, a loop of rope, and a wire ring threaded through the peak of a baseball cap. They changed their nights when somebody noticed the circles came on Fridays. They drove two hundred miles and back. His wife found out by reading the car's odometer.
When they finally confessed, in a London tabloid in September of nineteen ninety-one, the country's leading expert had already stood in a circle they made in a Kent field that same afternoon and said that no human being could have done it. He had goose pimples, he said. It was the most wonderful moment of his research.
And then the circles went on coming, bigger and better, for thirty more summers — because by then it had passed out of their hands.
A calm, unhurried telling of the record, for sleep, rest, or a long drive in the dark. Nobody in this hour is a fool: not the two men, not the researchers who walked those fields in good faith, not the people who believed. Nothing here will startle you or wake you. Where the evidence runs out, I say so.
More from Lantern and Ledger
In a parish office in Haggerston, in the first years of the reign, a registrar sat filling in a printed form about the streets where the dying was worst. He wrote down the drainage. He wrote down the water. Then he added a third line nobody had asked him for, standing up for his neighbours — that the people there were generally of cleanly habits, and that what was wrong with their streets was not their doing.
In a farmhouse room on a small island in Nova Scotia, somewhere in the eighteen-nineties, a county historian stood looking at paper silhouettes on a wall — the cut-out profiles people made of one another before photography. One of them was of a woman who had been a servant in the Treasurer's house at Halifax. The man who built that room had been born into slavery in South Carolina, got out during the Revolution, took his owner's surname because it was the name he had, and came north with the Loyalists. His name was Samuel Ball, and no likeness of him has ever existed.
In the spring of nineteen hundred, sponge divers from the island of Symi sheltered from bad weather off a rock between Kythera and Crete, and one of them went down on a rope in canvas and lead and tinned copper, with his air coming down a hose from a hand pump on the deck. He had perhaps ten minutes. What he was standing on was the cargo of an ancient ship — bronze and marble statues, glass, gold, coins — and one corroded lump about the size of a thick book that nobody recognised for the better part of a year, while the beautiful things beside it were cleaned and admired and photographed.
In eighteen eighty-four, in Baltimore, two men sat at a table with a rebuilt post-office scale and a pack of shuffled playing cards, pressing weights too small to feel onto each other's fingertips. One of them marked almost every answer as a pure guess — and was right two times in three anyway.
On a Sunday afternoon in February of nineteen ninety, a car stopped a quarter of a mile short of a prison gate outside Paarl, and a white-haired man of seventy-one got out with his wife and walked the rest of the way, live on television around the world. Twenty years later, a great many of the people who watched it would say they had already seen his funeral.