Britain has been plagued lately with circular areas incised in fields of cereal crops. G.T. Meaden has collected scores of such events, some of which he has published in his Journal of Meteorology . J.C. Belcher submitted a most interesting letter to Meaden. For example, when disturbed by a potential predator, a flock of sheep tends to mass protectively in a group of irregular outline, the group being formed of individual groups of small numbers of sheep. When grazing undisturbed, sheep tend to fan out from a given point, sometimes following a dominant group leader.
Progress is usually uncoordinated and ragged.
In general, patterns presented by sheep en masse are seen to be haphazard, indeed, generally random in nature. If follows that any suggestion of flocks of sheep forming geometric patterns would appear to be highly improbable, since this would call for group coordination only to be found in such as wolves and wild-dogs. In view of this it would appear that certain exceptional observations made on Sunday 21 August 1988 would be worthy of recording. Out on an afternoon drive M. Belcher parked his car near the trigonometric survey point on Baildon Moor, near Leeds, in Yorkshire, at approximately 1430 GMT facing northeast. That was Sheep Circle 1 on the plan where 'a hundred or so sheep were in a circular formation, each sheep being more or less equidistant from the next.