Mazes & Follies. Adrian Fisher by Adrian Fisher

(He is both.) His first maze was created more than 40 years ago at Greys Court, the Oxfordshire estate of Lady Brunner. (Kate told me that she found him by googling “maze designer”, and his was the only name that came up.)įisher is a friendly, digressive, opinionated, mischievous 70-year-old whom you might easily imagine as a force on the parish council or a pertinacious local newspaper columnist. King Minos of Crete had Daedalus our era has Fisher. The man they called in to help is Adrian Fisher, the world’s most prolific designer of mazes and labyrinths. (“It means ‘with God’s help’,” Kate says. Beneath the torus, the Baylis family motto, Deo juvante. “It’s a marker of where we’ve got to in this life and how we feel about things,” Kate says, “and a thread of Christian ethics that reaches back centuries.” You could tread its pathways just for the pleasure of its geometry, but if you look down at the paving slabs, you’ll see the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins and lines from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets: the signs of a tradition of English Catholic mysticism. But for the couple, the labyrinth will also be a subtle statement about their family history and Catholic faith. Its owners, Kate and Chris Baylis, run a visitor attraction, where the new project will find a place among their other wholesome draws, including the waterfall and the Victorian fern garden. The labyrinth is under construction at Canonteign, a 90-acre estate near Exeter. Stand here and you will see sky and clouds and Devon reflected in its curved surface. A torus, to be precise – a disc-like sculpture in polished stainless steel by the artist David Harber. On a hill at the edge of Dartmoor, England’s newest labyrinth is coming into being.

Saturday March 05 2022, 12.01am, The Times

Mazes & Follies. Adrian Fisher by Adrian Fisher