AN UNUSUAL SEAT WITH A VIEW

Early afternoon on a very hot Sunday is probably not the best time to be going out searching for a Blip, but after a good service at Church, we decided to go and look for a crop circle that we knew about at Hackpen Hill, just a few miles out of Swindon.

We stopped so that I could take a photograph of the cornfields and a view of the Hackpen White Horse, near The Ridgeway, on the edge of the Marlborough Downs - top and middle left of the collage.  This white horse is one of nine white horse hill figures in Wiltshire and is sometimes called the Broad Hinton White Horse because it is located a couple of miles from that village.  It is thought that it was cut by the local Parish Clerk, Henry Eatwell, in 1838 to commemorate the Coronation of Queen Victoria.  Interestingly, a number of Mr. HCB’s ancestors were born, married and died in the village of Broad Hinton.  

We thought that it would be busy up on the Ridgeway but fortunately, there weren’t that many people around, so after we had parked the car, we were able to walk down and actually stand quite near to the White Horse and I was then able to take quite a few shots of the crop circle - middle top photograph of the collage.  If you are interested and want to know more about this particular crop circle, you can read more here.  Apparently, you could pay £5 and actually go into the crop circle, but I was quite happy to see it from above.

I took several photographs of the splendid view and as it was such a clear day, we could see for miles - top and bottom right of the collage.  Of course, we wouldn’t actually stand ON the white horse, because it could damage it, but we did stand near and looked down at the crop circle.  

There were lots of butterflies and bees around;  the one on the yellow daisies is a ringlet and the one on the thistle is a six spot day-flying burnet moth, so Mr. HCB tells me.

We said it was a shame that there wasn’t a seat anywhere near, but on the way back up the hill, Mr. HCB pointed out a tree trunk and said that I could always take a shot of him and make it one of my Blips for “A Seat With a View” so I didn’t need a second bidding, so it’s not only a seat with a view, but also some dereliction as you can see from the tree trunk - and I don’t mean Mr. HCB, I wouldn’t be so unkind about my favourite model!

When we got back to the car park, we noticed that there were quite a lot of walkers and runners about, bottom left in the collage, and of course, the Ridgeway is ideal for ramblers - but they were all smiling as they went past.  We believe it must have been a sponsored walk from Uffington, where there is also a white horse, to Avebury, a distance of just over 17 miles, quite gruelling in the hot sun, and rather them than us, but they all seemed happy enough.

I thought it was good that Mr. HCB was willing to come out today, but he didn’t seem that keen to watch the football, now that England are not in the Final, and I am not that interested in tennis, but we didn’t stay out for that long - it was much cooler in the garden.

“If you still believe that aliens would travel 
     hundreds of light years 
          to carve temporary graffiti in our wheat, 
then your imagination 
     is one of the seven wonders of the world, 
          and should be bronzed.” 
Seth Shostak : 
Confessions of an Alien Hunter: 
A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence