Eugene Birchall · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

FolkloreGreen

Glastonbury Tor

added28 August 2026

A Somerset hill crowned by the lone St Michael's Tower, its slopes cut into terraces. It is identified with the legendary Avalon, where the wounded King Arthur was carried, and counted a centre of Britain's Celtic mythology.

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51.14444, -2.69861

Glastonbury Open in maps

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UFO sightingGreen

Warminster and the Thing

At Christmas 1964 people in this Wiltshire town began complaining of a strange noise — a low drone and crackle that shook roofs. The local paper called it the Thing, and that was the beginning. By 1965 hundreds were climbing Cley Hill above the town every night with flasks and binoculars; on the best weekends five thousand came. Warminster became Britain's first place of UFO tourism, decades before crop circles. The noise most likely came from the Salisbury Plain training area, which begins a couple of kilometres away. The lights over the hill were attributed to everything from signal flares to planets, and never entirely explained.

37 km away

DebunkedWhite

Operation Blackbird

In the summer of 1990 the BBC and Japan's Nippon TV, with the British Army, set up round-the-clock surveillance of the fields near Bratton in Wiltshire: image intensifiers, thermal cameras, radar and a camp on the hill. It was called Operation Blackbird and broadcast live. On the fifth morning, 25 July, a flawless pattern of circles was found in the field beneath the cameras, and the breakfast bulletin went out announcing a breakthrough. Within hours it emerged that a wooden Ouija board and a cross of sticks lay at the centre of each circle: a hoax carried out in the night directly under observation. None of the equipment had recorded anything at all.

42 km away

Ghost sightingYellow

The Ancient Ram Inn

A 12th-century house in Gloucestershire, said to stand on crossing ley lines and a pagan site. Reputed one of Britain's grimmest buildings — its owners avoided sleeping on the upper floor for decades.

60 km away

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