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Home « Hobbies « Mazes | |
Contents: Early Days | Movies | Hampton Court | Longleat | Secrets of The Maze | Recent Times | Hawaii
 The "pen flick" game |
I can't remember how I became interested in mazes in my youth. I'm guessing that it was probably a book, TV show or movie I saw when I was about 8 years old, but the details are now lost. Perhaps it was the tale of the Minotaur and the labyrinth and the trail of string. I used to hand-draw small mazes for my primary school friends, and one of my teachers was impressed and asked me to put one in the school newsletter. Unfortunately, I couldn't draw properly on the thin fragile tracing paper the teacher gave me so I gave-up and failed to get published, but I wasn't particularly bothered by this.
Note: Technically speaking a maze has choices of paths and dead-ends to confuse, whereas a labyrinth is a single winding path (called a unicursal maze). The two words tend to get used interchangeably, but I will stick to their technically correct usage. Although labyrinths can have beautiful winding designs, I personally find them rather boring because they present no navigation challenge.
In
early high-school at the age of 13 or so I became adept at drawing very large
and complicated mazes which my friends would take up to 15 minutes to navigate.
On the left is a computer generated sample of the sort of rectangular maze I
used to draw in my youth. Although this sample maze was generated by a Java
applet, it is identical in style to the ones I designed by hand. About this
time there was a silly but pleasant game going around school where combatants
would race through a hand drawn series of labrynthine paths by holding the top
of a pen between two fingers and flicking it down the paths. The next "shot"
would start where the previous ink trail stopped. If you hit a border or an
obstacle you would miss a shot. I enjoyed drawing complex "courses"
(like golf courses) ringed with tricky curves and "traps" to catch
and irritate the players. Thirty years later I tried to draw something vaguely
like I recall and play the "pen flick" game. On the upper right you
can see the results with my blue pen flicks hitting the wall twice and the diamond
shaped obstacle. A full game could last for 15-20 minutes on my large courses.
For decades I mainly forgot about mazes, probably due to distraction by music, work and computers, but I would certainly take note if I stumbled across one in the print or media. At this point I'm thinking of some notable movies with mazes that influenced me when I was younger.
I saw the movie Barbarella in the early 70s, much to the concern of my mother who thought I was seeing a "space fantasy movie" and not some kinky Sci-Fi romp starring a scantily clad Jane Fonda. It turns out I wouldn't fully appreciate this high-camp movie for another decade. I consider Barbarella to be a great SF movie worthy of cult status, but for the moment I will stick to the subject and say I'm always impressed by the dreary images of the stone maze (they call it a labyrinth) at the foot of evil Sogo city, full of exiled and lost souls wandering listlessly thought it. Some of the hopeless exiles are starting to merge with the rock walls of the maze.
 Barbarella (1967) |
I can't find any clear pictures of the maze, but on the left you can see Professor Ping (played by Marcel Marceau) standing in a rocky maze passageway. The Professor helps Barbarella defeat the The Great Tyrant (Anita Pallenberg) and her army of leather warriors. On the right is Pygar the angel who flies Barbarella out of the maze. It's difficult to determine the design and complexity of the maze in Barbarella because I can't recall seeing a clear overhead view of it. The maze does appear to be large, winding and quite complicated.
Going into the 1980s now, two memorable movie with mazes struck me:
 Time Bandits (1981) |
 Labyrinth (1986) |
The maze in Time Bandits is seen near the end of the movie when our heroes rush across the top of the maze walls to be captured by Evil and placed in the cages hanging in the void (a truly amazing scene). The maze is rectangular and of moderate size, but it can't be too complicated because the dwarves seem to navigate it reasonably quickly. It's unusual to see a maze used in this way where you navigate the walls and not the paths. The picture shows the dwarves just after they have traversed the maze and are waiting for a "prize" from a disguised Evil (played by David Warner in a frenzy of understated comic genius).
The plot of the movie Labyrinth revolves around the journey of a young girl and her puppet companions though a complex and shifting maze (yes! the movie title uses the wrong word). The maze is the star of this movie. The maze seems alive, shifting, capricious and cunning. As our heroes travel through the maze they encounter parts with totally different design styles and textures, beautifully realised by director Jim Henson and his team. Labyrinth is a very engaging and thought-provoking film, with some brainteasers and surprisingly intellectual content. You just have to ignore the wailing singing and presence of David Bowie in this one, who seemed to be sleepwalking though his role and has done much better.
The 1998 horror movie Hellraiser
II (Hellbound) will not only have you white-knuckled with fear and feeling
squeamish, it has some fabulous visions of a hell-like dimension filled with
a vast maze. The maze is ruled by the mad Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham) who
has been transformed by the Cenobites into one of them and floats around dangling
from the end of some long fleshy protuberance that's attached to his brain.
I haven't seen the movie for over 10 years, so my memories of the maze are a
bit vague. I'm keen to see the movie again and I'll update this page with more
details when the time comes. In the meantime, here are some small pop-up images
with two scenes from the movie and the advertising poster:
I'd heard about the movie Cube (1997) for a year or so before I finally found a copy to watch on VHS tape. Web discussions described it as a fabulous overlooked Sci-Fi that blended number theory, horror and a 3-D maze constructed out of moving cubical rooms. My suggestion is to overlook it. It's an overlong jumble that manages to take all the good ideas, blend them together and ruin them all. The 3-D maze is the star of the movie, so if you can ignore the people in the movie, then it's probably worth a look for real maze fans.
Related movie recommendations include: Brazil (1985), The Dark Crystal (1982).
On a hot July day in 1989 as a part of a European holiday I eagerly walked through the entrance of Hampton Court maze, one of the most famous in the world, and 90 seconds later I was through the middle and out again. What!...Was that it?
 Plan of Hampton Court Hedge Maze |
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| Click to pop-up photos of Hampton Court maze taken during a 1989 holiday | ||
I would not urge people to go out of their way to visit this maze. The concrete paths between the hedges create a cold commercial feeling, and it's just too easy. Sure, it has a history dating back to around 1690, but I think it's lost any romance that was once associated with it. It might be best to visit when the tourist crowds aren't too suffocating. You can see from the plan that the maze is quite simple, but at least the designers force you to visit a large area of the maze to traverse it.
 Longleat Entry Ticket |
About a week after the disappointing trip to Hampton Court we were driving up through Wiltshire after a visit to Stonehenge. On the way up the A36 I saw a road sign that said "Longleat House and Maze". A Maze! I'd never heard of Longleat, but we had plenty of time so I turned off. And the rest is history...I had accidentally stumbled across the largest hedge maze in the world. Hampton Court was a flea next to this monster maze which changed my perception of mazes forever and set the bar very high for all future mazes I would visit.
As I walked towards Longleat maze I was unprepared for the vast size and winding complexity. I could see bridges and a central viewing tower in the distance, so this wasn't just a standard maze, it was 3-D and clearly very difficult. The lady in the entrance booth said it took about an hour on average to get through the maze. Phew! (pack provisions and make sure you've been to the toilet) Off we went. For 20 minutes we deliberately tried to reach all of the extents of the maze, including the bridges and the central tower. After about 30 minutes we were getting eager to find the exit and exploration became quite serious. Somehow, more by luck than brains we stumbled into an area we had never been to before and it thankfully led to the exit and we stumbled out. It took about 50 minutes to traverse the maze. As we were on the way out, an American lady called to us from one of the bridges "How did you get over there? We've been stuck for an hour and our kids are waiting for us outside". Sadly, we couldn't tell her how we got out.
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Upon exit from the maze I asked the lady at the ticket booth if there was a plan of the maze available. She said that the design of the maze was a proprietary secret due to tough international design competition and there was litle chance I would ever find a plan of the Longleat Maze. To be honest, she's probably right about the competitive aspect, but I hardly suspected the design of Longleat maze was close to a military secret. Read on...
By accident, ten years after visiting Longleat I heard an interview on Radio National with Adrian Fisher who was promoting his book Secrets of the Maze (ISBN 0-500-01811-1, Quarto Publishing plc). Days later I rushed up to Cosmos Bookshop in the Melbourne suburb of St. Kilda and snatched a copy of the book for a considerable $45.00. The first thing I did was flip though the pages for technical information on Longleat maze, and there in all its clear beauty was a design plan of the maze (as it was in 1989 before the extension in the lower right).
Following is a scan of the plan of Longleat maze from Adrian Fisher's book, sharpened, colour flattened and carefully flood-filled with colours that highlight that internal structure of the maze. You can see that the maze is designed to be a group of nearly closed "cells" that link to each other via small bridges. This design neatly mirrors the experience of being inside the maze, where one gets the feeling of being stuck in a certain area, then stumbling into a new area and getting stuck again. The way the "cells" overlap is quite confusing, and the 3 spirals compound the confusion in a serious way. Just stare at the design for a while and try to imagine the difficulty of walking through a real hedge maze that follows this design. Follow the In brown path which has only a single way out of the "cell" via the purple path, which then splits into 3 paths of which only one is the way out and the other two will lead you deep into the bowels of the maze.
Colour-coded plan of Longleat
Maze to show the structure
I've already mentioned this book by Adrian Fisher and Howard Loxton in relation to Longleat, but I feel compelled to dwell on the book for a moment and praise it. This attractive book discusses mazes and labyrinths of every type, from all over the world, from ancient to modern times. The pages are filled with beautiful pictures and plans of mazes. You even get transparent paper and a pen attached to the book so you can trace your way through the pages of mazes.
Here are some mazes visited in the last few years. Click on the images to enlarge.
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Ashcombe Maze About 40 minutes drive from Melbourne near Shoreham on the Mornington Peninsular. There is a pleasant licenced restaurant, the main hedge maze, smaller ornamental mazes, flower gardens, water displays and sculptures in the large gardens. The main maze is neatly constructed with gravel paths and is split into two parts separated by a garden. The maze difficulty level is about 5 out of 10, taking us about 10-15 minutes to traverse each part at a leisurely pace. There is enough interesting stuff at Ashcome to keep you occupied for many hours. |
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Arthur's Seat Maze A modern collection of mazes designed by Adrian Fisher. This site is only about 15 minutes drive from Ashcombe maze and has similar features. You could easily spend most of a Sunday having lunch in the nice restaurant which looks down upon the mazes. The main hedge maze has an Japanese theme with difficulty level of about 5 out of 10, taking about 10-15 minutes to traverse. The centre of the maze has a tasteful Japanese water garden and you are invited to find various "treasures" hidden in the extents of maze. See the official Arthur's Seat Web Site. |
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Wandiligong Maze About 10 minutes drive from Bright in north east Victoria. If you're in the Bright area then this is a good place to visit for lunch and a maze walk. We didn't stop for lunch so I can't report on the restaurant. The maze is only 12 years old but it has a quaint old fashioned feel to it. The difficulty level is about 6 out of 10, taking us about 20 minutes to the reach the two viewing platforms and find our way out.
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On 28-Apr-2007, as a part of a Hawaiian holiday, we visited the Dole Plantation Pineapple Garden Maze on the island of O'ahu. I found a reference to the maze in a tourist brochure a few days before we departed, so I mentally ticked it for a visit. The following thumbnails borrowed from the Gallery page show the Dole Plantation courtyard, the entrance to the maze and the inside of the maze.
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Thumbnails generated on 08/12/07 17:14:04
As the maze map shows, it's a clever and quite complex design, but the pineapple plants that walls are made from are not very tightly knitted together and it's too easy to cheat by looking into other pathways. I noticed that some wall openings existed that were not on the map. Some were obviously deliberate and must have been added recently, and they made navigation far too easy. Other openings seem to have been stretched apart by visitors who may have been impatient and damaged the walls. Children could easily walk through some of the damaged openings and adults could stoop and slip through sideways. It's curious that the designers added so many little "serifs" (bumps) to the walls, as it would make maintenance much harder while adding little to the difficulty or appearance.
At the entrance you can take a pencil and log sheet and atttempt to visit all of the coloured dot points on the map, notate a secret from a metal box at each point and return to the entrance. The fastest times received prizes, and the record on the scoreboard was about 4 minutes. We didn't bother with that, as I just wanted to wander around and reach the far corners of the maze.
Overall, I would rate the Dole Plantation 
maze as a slight disappointment. The walls are partly transparent, damaged and
breached, reducing the potential difficulty. The middle of the maze is a large
area devoted to a mini-maze map of a pineapple, and although it's quite attractive,
it wastes a huge amount of space that could be occupied by more of the main
maze. The difficultly level is about 4 out of 10.
Despite the Guinness Book claims made about the maze, it's a toy compared to the Longleat maze.
At the canteen and huge shop you can get pineapple bread, pineapple cake, pineapple slushies, pineapple pieces, pineapple juice, pineapple shirts, pineapple postcards, pineapple fridge magnets and I think they even sell pineapples. By the time you leave the place you might be "yellow blind" and carry a slight aversion to pineapple for a few weeks.
