The first hedge maze I ever navigated was at Hampton Court Palace. It was planted for William III of Orange as a means of entertainment for the gentry in around 1690, making it the oldest surviving hedge maze in the world. It is not vast – the paths cover about half a mile – and it is not too disorientating in its design. Still, I felt quite lost, until I reached the middle.

Hedge mazes are popular in England, and they are often associated with the country, but in fact it was the Ancient Greeks – they of the Labyrinth and Minotaur myth – who first created such mazes. For them, walking around a labyrinth (defined as a maze with only one path to follow) was a journey to spiritual enlightenment: no sense of time or direction, just freedom from the outer world. It was thought that the labyrinth was a path to discovering one’s destiny in life.

Certainly, walking through a maze is an unsettling experience; there is the thrill of the challenge, but also a gnawing anxiety that can grow as you realise you are lost. This extract from the 1889 book Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome perfectly captures how the characters experience the Hampton Court Palace maze:

‘We’ll just go in here, so that you can say you’ve been, but it’s very simple. It’s absurd to call it a maze. You keep on taking the first turning to the right. We’ll just walk round for ten minutes, and then go and get some lunch.’

…Harris kept on turning to the right, but it seemed a long way, and his cousin said he supposed it was a very big maze.

‘Oh, one of the largest in Europe,’ said Harris.

‘Yes, it must be,’ replied the cousin, ‘because we’ve walked a good two miles already.’

Harris began to think it rather strange himself, but he held on until, at last, they passed the half of a penny bun on the ground that Harris’s cousin swore he had noticed there seven minutes ago.

Interesting to note that the word ‘maze’ is derived from the Old English ‘amaze’, and its original meaning was delirium.

Had I a time machine, the maze I would visit is the labyrinth of Versailles, built for Louis XIV of France in 1677. Upon the advice of father of the fairy tale Charles Perrault, 39 fountains were included in the hedge maze, each representing a different fable by the Ancient Greek slave Aesop. Each fountain featured metal sculptures of the animals of the fable, and was accompanied by a plaque on which was inscribed a verse by the poet Isaac de Benserade; the idea was that the labyrinth would entertain Louis’s son, le Grand Dauphin, and help him learn to read. Here is the fountain for ‘The Fox and the Crane’:

Source: Jacques Bailly’s Le Labyrinthe de Versailles (c. 1675)

At the entrance to the labyrinth were two statues, of Aesop and of Love – Eros – holding a ball of thread like Ariadne in the Ancient Greek myth of Minos’s Labyrinth (see https://hannahfielding.net/staging/1129/labyrinth/).

The labyrinth of Versailles proved so popular that Perrault published a guidebook, entitled Labyrinte de Versailles, in which he shared descriptions of the fountains, the verses by Isaac de Benserade and the fables on which the fountains were based. It was reprinted and even translated into English. Here is the map:

Source: Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, GR 185

The Versailles labyrinth became legendary, especially for the Aesop fountains which, according to a Dutch book of 1682, made the maze ‘not at all tedious’ but ‘mysterious and instructive’. Sadly, though, it was destroyed in 1778 on the instruction of Louis XVI and an arboretum planted in its place. I imagine it was a sad job to fell all those hedges and dig up all the fountains. Only fragments remain today, in the Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.

Have you ever navigated a hedge (or corn) maze? How do you find the sensation of being a step out of time? Do you think there is something in the Ancient Greek idea that while lost in a labyrinth, we can find ourselves and our true path in life?