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Title: Crop Marks Emerge on English Countryside
News:
by Mike Krumboltz

There's something odd going on in the United Kingdom. Unusual crop patterns are surfacing near Bradford Abbas, Dorset. But unlike most crop circle stories, this one doesn't involve rumors of visitors from another planet. This time the circles come from civilizations past.

The BBC hosts an intriguing article that helps to make some sense of the mystery. Thousands of years ago, there were prehistoric and Roman settlements across the English countryside. In the years since, crops have grown where the settlements used to be. Thanks to the crop marks, the settlements are never really gone.

English Heritage, an organization that "promotes and protects" the nation's historic environment, has remarked that these discoveries are being aided by this year's dry weather and the Icelandic ash cloud from several months back.

English Heritage senior investigator Dave MacLeod explains that "Cropmarks are always at their best in dry weather, but the last few summers have been a disappointment." This is the best summer since the drought of 1976 for viewing the marks.

Aerial photographs "show marks made when crops growing over buried features develop at a different rate from those nearby." Up close, they're impossible to see. But from the air, a pattern emerges.

Photos: See images of the crop marks.

Of course, the "discoveries" are really nothing more than faded lines, but they do offer a long-lost look into English history. Some crop marks reveal an outline of what was once a "lightly built defensive enclosure." Others reveal livestock enclosures, trackways, and field systems.

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