Blenheim Palace – the Marlborough Maze
Many new mazes were built as part of the 1991 to celebrate The Year of the Maze and Adrian Fisher, one of the world’s foremost maze designers and builders, chose to build his celebration maze at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. Blenheim occupies the site of the legendary Rosamund's Bower, an architectural labyrinth with heavy defences in which Henry II is said to have installed his mistress Fair Rosamund. According to legend, when Queen Eleanor, his wife, finally penetrated the maze in 1176, she found her rival there and forced her rival to drink poison. The Marlborough family's famous military son, Winston Churchill, was born at Blenheim in 1874.
The inspiration for the Marlborough Maze came from stone sculptures depicting the Panoply of Victory, carved by Grinling Gibbons for the roof of Blenheim Palace. Seen from above, the lines of the yew hedges portray pyramids of cannonballs, a cannon firing, and the air filled with banners and flags. The maze has two entrances to left and right, with a central exit.
Two wooden bridges add an exciting additional aspect to the puzzle element of the maze, while simultaneously providing viewing points from which to survey the work. The whole maze is an astonishing 294 by 185 feet in size and visitors spend an average of thirty minutes working their way through it.
One of Fisher's colour mazes can also be found at Blenheim. This labyrinth consists of nodes connected by coloured paths where you choose you next direction depending on the colour of the last path you came down – such paving mazes are a modern and cost effective addition to the world of maze design.
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