Occasional notes on labyrinths, mazes and the stories people tell about them.
September 2026
A classical labyrinth has a single path: it winds back and forth, but it never forks. You cannot get lost in it — you can only be patient. A maze is a puzzle with choices and dead ends. The Cretan coins from Knossos show the first kind, yet the myth describes the second.
July 2026
Unwinding a thread behind you and following it back is, in effect, depth-first search with backtracking. Trémaux described a version for marking passages in the nineteenth century; the idea is much older than the name.
May 2026
Fewer than a dozen historic turf mazes survive. The one at Saffron Walden is the largest: seventeen circuits cut into the grass, re-cut every few decades so the pattern does not fade.