Way back in April 2021 I wrote a piece about the Elizabethan painting below, which as you can see from the detail, has a maze in the background. It struck me as an unusual things to put into a portrait, although I soon discovered that it was almost certainly an allegory about finding the right path in life, rather than anything in the sitter’s own garden.
What I hadn’t fully realised then was that the idea of walking round a low-level maze wasn’t actually that strange because the English countryside was once dotted with earthwork labyrinths or turf-mazes of a similar kind, although not many survive today.
Nor did I realise quite how popular mazes and labyrinths were, with many intriguing stories around them, although usually with very little hard evidence to back them up. Indeed there is an entire sub-culture debating their origins and purposes, and as a result the boundary between fact and fiction, or evidence and conjecture, is “flexible” to put it mildly. There is sound academic research but also a lot of “new age” fantasy where in the end you can almost believe what you want. Today’s post is just going to wend its way through the labyrinth looking at just a small part of this world: the turf maze.
Breamore mizmaze from Google maps
The Garden History Blog 
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