The History of Mazes: Ancient Labyrinths, Hedge Mazes and Corn Mazes

The history of mazes runs about 4,000 years, from a single-path symbol scratched and carved across the ancient world, through the legendary labyrinth of Crete, Roman floor mosaics and medieval cathedral pavements, to the puzzle hedges of English palaces and the corn mazes that pop up on American farms every fall. Along the way, the design changed from a path you simply follow into a puzzle you have to solve.

This guide walks through that story in order, with dates and sources for each step. It also clears up the most common mix-up, the difference between a labyrinth and a maze, because that difference is really the story of how mazes became puzzles.

Labyrinth or maze? The difference that shapes the whole story

People use the two words interchangeably, and in everyday speech that's fine. But historians and maze designers usually draw a line between them, and it helps to know where.

• A labyrinth, in the classic sense, has a single path. It winds back and forth, often in a circle, but it never splits. If you keep walking, you'll reach the center. There are no choices and no dead ends. Designers call this unicursal, meaning "one course."
• A maze, in the puzzle sense, has branches, choices and dead ends. You can get lost. Designers call this multicursal, meaning "many courses."

Feature	Classic labyrinth	Puzzle maze
Number of paths	One path, no branches	Many branches and dead ends
Can you get lost?	No	Yes, that's the point
Main purpose	Symbol, ritual, walking or meditation	Puzzle, entertainment, challenge
Typical setting	Coins, mosaics, church floors, turf	Hedges, paper, cornfields
Famous example	The pavement labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral	The hedge maze at Hampton Court Palace

Here's the twist. The ancient Greek myth describes the Cretan labyrinth as a place where you could get hopelessly lost, which sounds like a maze. Yet the pictures the ancient Cretans themselves put on their coins show a single winding path. The Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford points out exactly this: the labyrinth design on coins from Knossos has a single path to the center, unlike the literary descriptions. So the "labyrinth" of legend was a maze, while the labyrinth of art was a labyrinth. That tension runs through the next 2,000 years.

Even the record books keep the distinction. Guinness World Records describes the Hampton Court hedge maze as a puzzle maze rather than a symbolic one, where the aim is to reach the center and then find the way out.

Maze and labyrinth vocabulary

A few more terms will make the rest of the story easier to follow.

Term	Meaning
Unicursal	Having one path with no branches. The classic labyrinth.
Multicursal	Having branching paths and choices. The puzzle maze.
Circuit	One loop of a labyrinth path around the center. The classical labyrinth has seven; the medieval design has eleven.
Seed pattern	A small starting figure of lines and dots that you connect with arcs to draw a classical labyrinth.
Turf maze	A path cut into short grass, common on English village greens.
Hedge maze	A maze with walls of clipped, living hedges, usually too tall to see over.
Perfect maze	A maze with exactly one route between any two points and no loops.
Island	A section of wall that doesn't connect to the outer edge. Islands create loops and can defeat simple solving rules.

The earliest labyrinths: a symbol across the ancient world

The oldest labyrinths weren't places at all. They were pictures. The University of Edinburgh's history of labyrinths says evidence of the classical labyrinth symbol dates from roughly 2000 BCE across southern Europe and North Africa, where it appeared as rock carvings, paintings, and inscriptions on ceramics, tiles and coins. The same page notes that the design later turned up across Asia, the Americas and southern Africa.

The "classical" labyrinth that Edinburgh describes is the seven-circuit design: a single path that loops around a center seven times before reaching it. You can draw one yourself from a simple "seed" of a cross, four corner marks and four dots, connecting the ends in order. It turns up in so many places and periods that it's clearly more than a doodle. With only one path and no wrong turns, it was never a puzzle. It was a symbol.

A 2004 Christian Science Monitor feature on mazes, written by Sharon J. Huntington, makes the same point in plainer terms: the first known mazes were built about 4,000 years ago, had a single winding path, and were used for rituals and processions.

Crete, the Minotaur and the coins of Knossos

The most famous labyrinth of all belongs to a myth. In the Greek story, King Minos of Crete had the craftsman Daedalus build a labyrinth at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a monster with a bull's head. Every few years, young people from Athens were sent in as victims, until the hero Theseus killed the Minotaur and found his way out with a thread given to him by Minos's daughter, Ariadne.

The Ashmolean's "Myths of the Labyrinth" page, written for its 2023 exhibition Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality, traces how that myth grew and changed:

• Homer's Iliad, composed before 700 BCE, mentions Knossos and a dancing floor that Daedalus built for Ariadne, but not a labyrinth.
• Greek vases from around 500 BCE often show Theseus killing the Minotaur.
• Hellenistic coins from Knossos, made between 300 and 200 BCE, carry a labyrinth design, sometimes with a Minotaur at the center.
• Later writers confused Knossos with the rival city of Gortyn, which became the Roman capital of Crete after the Roman conquest began in 69 BCE. Quarrying near Gortyn left underground passages, and the Byzantine author Ioannes Malalas described the labyrinth as a cave near Gortyn.
• In 1415, the Florentine priest Cristoforo Buondelmonti visited Crete and described those passages near Gortyn.

A coin you can still see

You don't have to take the coins on faith. The Harvard Art Museums hold a silver stater (a standard Greek coin) from Knossos dated 300 to 270 BCE. One side shows the head of Hera wearing a crown. The other shows a labyrinth of multiple lines inside a square, with an arrowhead to the left and a thunderbolt to the right. The museum's record notes that the labyrinth is a reference to Knossos, the site tied to the Minoan labyrinth. For a city, putting the labyrinth on its money was like putting a famous landmark on a postcard. It said, "This is us."

Archaeology meets the myth

The search for a real labyrinth at Knossos is a story of its own. The Ashmolean records that in 1878 a local businessman, Minos Kalokairinos, began digging at Knossos and found a building with carved symbols, which he identified as King Minos's palace. Visiting archaeologists called it the "Daedalian Labyrinth." Arthur Evans visited in March 1894 and excavated the site between 1900 and 1904, calling it the "Palace of Minos." He found double-axe symbols and argued that the word labrys meant "double axe," so "labyrinth" meant "House of the Double Axes." The Bronze Age palace is thought to have stood from about 2000 to 1350 BCE.

Was the sprawling palace, with its many rooms and corridors, the seed of the labyrinth legend? Maybe. The Ashmolean exhibition framed it as an open question: did the labyrinth exist, or was it a product of imagination? Either way, the myth gave us the word, and the idea of a building designed to confuse.

Ariadne's thread: the first maze-solving method

Read the Theseus story as a puzzle fan and something jumps out. Ariadne's thread is a maze-solving technique. By unspooling a thread behind him, Theseus could always retrace his steps, which is the key idea behind many real methods for escaping a maze: keep track of where you've been so you never wander in circles and can always back out of a dead end. Mathematicians and engineers later turned that idea into precise rules, like marking each passage as you use it. It's a lovely sign that people have thought about "how do you get out?" for as long as they've told stories about mazes.

The thread also explains why the story needs a branching maze, not a single-path labyrinth. In a true labyrinth, you could never get lost, so Theseus wouldn't need a thread at all. The myth only makes sense if the building had choices and dead ends. That's one more reason the "labyrinth" of legend sits closer to what we'd now call a maze.

Labyrinths in Egypt and in ancient writing

Crete wasn't the only place with a labyrinth in ancient writing. The Ashmolean notes that Herodotus, the earliest Greek historian, placed a labyrinth in Egypt at Crocodilopolis. Several hundred years later, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder listed several labyrinths and said that nothing remained of the Cretan one.

That tells us something useful. By Roman times, "labyrinth" had become a general word for a huge, complicated building, not just the Cretan story. The word had started to drift toward the meaning we give "maze" today: a place where it's hard to find your way.

Roman mosaic labyrinths

The Romans loved the labyrinth as decoration. According to the University of Edinburgh, the classical design changed into a more complex Roman form between about 165 BCE and 400 CE. These Roman labyrinths were mostly mosaic pavements in bathhouses, villas and tombs, and nearly all of them were too small to walk.

Edinburgh mentions two British examples you can still see: the Harpham mosaic at the Hull and East Riding Museum and the Caerleon mosaic at the Caerleon Museum in Wales.

Notice the pattern. Like the coins, these were single-path designs, meant to be looked at or traced with the eye, not puzzles to solve.

Medieval church labyrinths and Chartres

In the Middle Ages, the labyrinth moved into churches. Edinburgh's history says that near the end of the 9th century, a monk named Otfrid added four circuits to the seven-circuit pattern, creating an eleven-circuit design. Dozens of 12th- and 13th-century labyrinths in European cathedrals and churches followed that model.

The most famous is at Chartres Cathedral in France. Edinburgh dates it to about 1201, laid in the floor of the nave (the long central hall of the church), and calls it probably the most walked labyrinth in the world. The Christian Science Monitor feature adds that cathedrals in France and Italy from the 12th to the 14th centuries included maze-like floor designs representing life's journey.

These pavement labyrinths were large enough to walk, and walking them slowly, perhaps in prayer, was the point. There's still only one path, so there's no way to get lost. In that sense, Chartres is the opposite of a puzzle. It's a designed experience of a long, winding journey that always ends at the center.

Why the circuit count matters

The jump from seven to eleven circuits isn't just a bigger drawing. More circuits mean more turns, a longer walk and more chances to lose track of where you are, even on a single path. You can see the slow move toward complexity that later blossomed into true puzzle mazes.

Turf and stone labyrinths of northern Europe

Out in the open air, people cut labyrinths into grass and laid them out in stones. The University of Edinburgh notes that stone or turf labyrinths in northern Europe were largely laid down between the 12th and 17th centuries and were built for walking.

England's turf mazes are a good example. A turf maze is a path cut into short grass, with the grass forming the walls (or the path itself, depending on the design). They need re-cutting regularly, or they vanish. The maze on the Common at Saffron Walden, in Essex, is one of the best known. Historic England's official listing for The Maze, Saffron Walden describes it as a turf maze of thought-to-be medieval origin and says the earliest documentary evidence is from 1699, when the town's account books recorded a payment for re-cutting it. It's listed at Grade II.

Stone labyrinths were common farther north. The Christian Science Monitor feature reports that more than 600 stone mazes line the shores of the Baltic Sea.

Many turf and stone labyrinths still follow the single-path idea. But by the 1600s, gardens were about to take the maze somewhere new.

Hedge mazes and the Hampton Court maze

Hedge mazes are where the maze truly becomes a puzzle. Instead of low lines on the ground, the walls are tall living hedges. You can't see over them, so you can't see the path ahead. Add branches and dead ends, and you have something genuinely confusing.

The Christian Science Monitor notes that in the Middle Ages, kings and princes built hedge mazes for entertainment. The most famous surviving one is at Hampton Court Palace, just outside London. Guinness World Records lists it as the oldest surviving hedge maze, with these details:

• It was planted in 1690, commissioned by King William III and Queen Mary II.
• It was designed by the royal gardeners George London and Henry Wise.
• The original hedges were hornbeam.
• It covers about 0.2 hectares (half an acre), and its paths are roughly 800 meters (about half a mile) long.
• Over the centuries, it's been repaired and partly replanted, mainly with English yew.

And, as Guinness puts it, it's a puzzle maze: the goal is to reach the center and then find your way back out.

Why gardens wanted puzzles

A hedge maze is a social game. People walk in together, split up, call to each other over the hedges and race to the middle. It's a kind of entertainment that only works with tall walls and real choices, which is exactly why the single-path labyrinth gave way to the branching maze in pleasure gardens.

A famous visit: Three Men in a Boat (1889)

By the late 1800s, the Hampton Court maze was famous enough to star in a bestselling comic novel. In Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, published in 1889, the character Harris boasts that the maze is simple. Having studied a map, he says you just keep taking the first turning to the right.

It doesn't go well. Harris leads a growing crowd of strangers around in circles. They pass the same half-eaten bun twice. The map doesn't help. Every attempt to leave brings them back to the center. A keeper climbs a ladder and shouts directions, which only confuses everyone more. When the keeper comes in to fetch them, he's new to the job, and he gets lost too. They only escape when an older keeper comes back from his dinner.

The scene is fiction, but it tells us two real things. First, the maze was a well-known attraction that Victorian readers would recognize. Second, people were already trying "rules" to beat mazes, and finding out the hard way that a rule has to be the right one.

Harris's rule versus the wall follower

Harris's rule (take the first right turn every time) isn't the same as the classic wall-follower method, where you keep one hand on the wall and never let go. The wall follower works in any maze where all the walls connect to the outside edge, because tracing one continuous wall must eventually bring you back out. It can fail in mazes with "islands," sections of wall that float free inside the maze, because you can end up circling an island forever. Choosing turns by a fixed habit, like Harris did, has no such guarantee at all. If you're curious how these methods compare, our separate guide to maze-solving algorithms covers the wall follower, Trémaux's method and modern computer approaches step by step.

Mazes in America: hedges, then corn

Mazes crossed the Atlantic too. The Christian Science Monitor reports that hedge mazes appeared in America in the early 19th century, but most were abandoned during the Depression of the early 1930s. Tall hedges take years to grow and constant care to keep, which is hard to justify when money is tight.

The first corn maze

The American maze came roaring back in a very American form: the cornfield. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the first U.S. corn maze was created in 1993 in Annville, Pennsylvania, by students and staff at Lebanon Valley College who wanted to help victims of flooding in the Midwest. It was a dinosaur shape cut into a three-acre field.

Michigan Public, the public radio station, credits Don Frantz with creating what it calls the first American corn maze in Pennsylvania in the early 1990s, inspired by small European hedge mazes and working with the English maze designer Adrian Fisher of Minotaur Designs. Different sources tell the story with slightly different emphasis, but they agree on the place and the era.

How corn mazes spread and changed

• The Christian Science Monitor reports that Brett Herbst began designing corn mazes in 1996 and had created more than 600 by 2004, and that more than 100 corn mazes were operating in the U.S. that year.
• Corn mazes last only one season, since they're made from a growing crop.
• Designers plant corn in diagonal blocks, or in two directions, so visitors can't use the rows to find their way. Michigan Public says planting in two directions creates thick walls that are hard to see through.
• Michigan Public also describes the change in design tools. In the early 2000s, one Michigan farm sketched its mazes on graph paper and cut them by following a paper map of the field. In 2011, the same farm began using satellite-guided GPS to plan and cut its mazes, which lets designers create complex mazes that stretch for miles.

The corn maze completes a neat circle. The very first labyrinths were pictures meant to be seen from above. Modern corn mazes are often giant pictures too, like a dinosaur, a sphinx or a movie scene, that only make sense from the air. But unlike the ancient symbols, they're full of dead ends.

Paper mazes and puzzle books

Today, most people meet mazes on paper. A paper maze keeps the hedge maze's key feature, choices and dead ends, but lets you see the whole thing at once. That changes the challenge. Instead of being lost inside, you're searching from above, and you can work backward from the exit, which is often easier.

Paper mazes come in many styles:

• Grid mazes, built on a square grid, are the most common in puzzle books and on worksheets.
• Circular mazes echo the old labyrinth shape but add branches.
• Picture mazes hide the path inside the outline of an animal, a holiday symbol or a letter.
• "Perfect" mazes have exactly one path between any two points, with no loops. Every dead end is a true dead end.

Computers changed paper mazes the same way GPS changed corn mazes. Programs can now build a fresh, perfect maze in an instant, at any size and difficulty. How they do it is a lovely bit of math, and it's covered in our separate guide to maze generation algorithms. If you want to jump straight to solving, try our printable mazes, step up to a difficult maze, or browse mazes for adults. Younger solvers will like the gentler mazes for kids.

A timeline of the history of mazes

Here's the whole story in one place, with each date drawn from the sources cited above.

Date	Event	Type
About 2000 BCE	Classical labyrinth symbol appears in rock carvings, ceramics, tiles and coins across southern Europe and North Africa	Labyrinth (symbol)
About 2000 to 1350 BCE	The Bronze Age palace at Knossos stands	Building later linked to the myth
Before 700 BCE	Homer's Iliad mentions Knossos and Daedalus's dancing floor for Ariadne	Literature
About 500 BCE	Greek vases show Theseus killing the Minotaur	Art
300 to 200 BCE	Knossos coins carry a single-path labyrinth	Labyrinth (coin)
About 165 BCE to 400 CE	Roman mosaic labyrinths in baths, villas and tombs	Labyrinth (mosaic)
Late 9th century	The monk Otfrid creates the eleven-circuit design	Labyrinth (design)
About 1201	Chartres Cathedral's pavement labyrinth is laid	Labyrinth (walkable)
12th to 17th centuries	Stone and turf labyrinths laid across northern Europe	Labyrinth (walkable)
1415	Buondelmonti describes underground passages near Gortyn	Travel writing
1690	Hampton Court hedge maze planted for William III and Mary II	Puzzle maze (hedge)
1699	Earliest record of the Saffron Walden turf maze being re-cut	Turf maze
1878	Minos Kalokairinos begins digging at Knossos	Archaeology
1889	Three Men in a Boat makes the Hampton Court maze a comic set piece	Literature
1900 to 1904	Arthur Evans excavates the "Palace of Minos"	Archaeology
Early 1930s	Most American hedge mazes are abandoned during the Depression	Hedge maze
1993	First U.S. corn maze cut in Annville, Pennsylvania	Puzzle maze (corn)
2011	A Michigan farm switches to GPS to design and cut its corn maze	Puzzle maze (corn)

Try it yourself: draw a classical labyrinth

The seven-circuit classical labyrinth looks complicated, but you can draw one in a couple of minutes using the traditional seed pattern. It's a fun way to feel connected to the people who carved this shape thousands of years ago.

1. Draw the seed. In the middle of your page, draw a plus sign (a cross). In each of the four spaces between the arms of the cross, draw a right angle (an L shape) whose arms run parallel to the cross and whose corner points in toward the center. Then put a dot in the open crook of each right angle, out toward the corners of your figure. You now have a small figure with lots of loose ends and dots.
2. Make the first arch. Start at the top end of the vertical line of the cross. Draw a small curved arch over to the nearest loose end on its right.
3. Make the second arch. Go to the nearest unused end or dot just to the left of where you started. Draw a bigger arch over the first one, landing on the next unused end or dot on the right side.
4. Keep going. Each time, take the next unused point on the left and connect it to the next unused point on the right with an arch that goes around the outside of all the arches so far. Work your way down both sides until every end and dot is connected.
5. Trace it. Find the opening at the bottom and follow the path with your finger. It will swing back and forth through all seven circuits and arrive at the center without a single choice.

If your path splits or dead-ends, an arch has skipped a point. Erase back to the last arch that looked right and try again. Once you've got it, try adding branches and dead ends to turn your labyrinth into a maze. You'll have recreated, in one sitting, the big change from symbol to puzzle that took people thousands of years.

Tips for visiting a hedge or corn maze

Walking a real maze is a different experience from solving one on paper. You can't see the layout, so memory and teamwork matter more than spotting patterns. A few practical tips:

• Pick landmarks. A tall tree, a barn roof or the position of the sun can tell you which way you're facing when every hedge looks the same.
• Remember your turns. Saying them out loud ("left, right, right") is a low-tech Ariadne's thread. It helps you back out of dead ends.
• Use the wall follower carefully. Keeping one hand on a wall works when all the walls connect to the outside edge, but it can lead you in circles around an island, and it often takes the long way.
• Agree on a meeting spot. Groups split up quickly in a maze. Decide in advance where to regroup if someone gets separated.
• Take any map or clues the site offers. Many modern mazes are designed as games, with checkpoints or puzzles along the way, and using them is part of the fun.
• Bring water and good shoes. Paths can be long. Hampton Court's paths alone add up to roughly half a mile, and large corn mazes can be far bigger.

Common myths about maze history

• "Labyrinths and mazes are the same thing." In everyday speech, sure. But for most of history, labyrinths had one path and no choices. Branching puzzle mazes came much later.
• "Archaeologists found the Minotaur's labyrinth." No one has found a building that matches the myth. Evans and others linked the maze-like palace at Knossos to the story, and the Ashmolean's exhibition treated the question as open.
• "Church labyrinths were puzzles." Pavement labyrinths like Chartres have a single path. They were made for walking, not for getting lost.
• "Hampton Court's hedges are the originals." The maze dates to 1690, but Guinness notes it has been repaired and partly replanted over the centuries, mainly with yew in place of the original hornbeam.
• "Corn mazes are an old farm tradition." They're recent. The first U.S. corn maze dates to 1993.

What the history of mazes teaches puzzle makers

Looking back across 4,000 years, a few design lessons stand out, and they still apply if you're drawing a maze for a class or a party.

• A single path is calming; branches are exciting. The ancient labyrinth was meant to be followed. The puzzle maze was meant to be beaten. Decide which feeling you want.
• Walls you can't see over make everything harder. That's why hedge and corn mazes feel so much tougher than a paper maze of the same layout.
• A picture makes it memorable. From Knossos coins to dinosaur corn mazes, people love a maze that's also a shape.
• Rules of thumb can fail. Harris's "first turning to the right" is a good reminder that not every shortcut works, and that loops and islands can trap simple strategies.

Teachers and families use mazes for all kinds of reasons, from fine motor practice to quiet time, and our page on ways to use a maze maker collects ideas. For a look at what puzzles can and can't do for thinking skills, see our article asking are puzzles good for the brain.

Bring the history home

From a carved symbol to a GPS-cut cornfield, the history of mazes is really the story of people turning a simple winding line into a challenge worth solving. The next time you trace a path on paper, you're joining a very long line of maze walkers.

If you'd like to build a puzzle packet to go with a lesson on ancient Crete or a fall trip to a corn maze, our free puzzle maker lets you type your own words or pick a theme, choose a puzzle type, and print it with an answer key. Pair it with a printable maze, and you've got a ready-made activity that covers both words and wayfinding.

Six Kinds of Maze Side by Side

This table compares the main kinds of maze from the story by when they appeared and what they were for.

Kind of maze	When	Setting and purpose
Roman mosaic labyrinths	About 165 BCE to 400 CE	Mosaic pavements in bathhouses, villas and tombs, mostly too small to walk and meant to be traced with the eye
Medieval church labyrinths	Dozens in the 12th and 13th centuries, with Chartres around 1201	Floor designs in cathedrals, large enough to walk slowly, with one path and no way to get lost
Turf and stone labyrinths	Mostly the 12th to 17th centuries in northern Europe	Cut into grass or laid in stones outdoors and built for walking
Hedge mazes	Hampton Court planted in 1690	Tall living hedges with branches and dead ends, a true puzzle with the goal of reaching the center and finding the way out
Corn mazes	First U.S. corn maze in 1993 in Annville, Pennsylvania	Cut into a growing crop, so each lasts only one season, with rows planted so visitors can't follow them
Paper mazes	Today	Puzzle books and worksheets where you see the whole maze at once and can work backward from the exit

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between a maze and a labyrinth?

In the classic sense, a labyrinth has a single path that winds to the center with no branches or dead ends, so you cannot get lost. A maze has branches, choices and dead ends, so finding the way is a puzzle. People often use the words interchangeably, and the Greek myth of the Cretan labyrinth describes something more like a maze. But ancient coins, Roman mosaics and medieval church floors almost always show single-path labyrinths.

How old are mazes and labyrinths?

The University of Edinburgh's history of labyrinths dates evidence of the classical labyrinth symbol to roughly 2000 BCE, in rock carvings, ceramics, tiles and coins across southern Europe and North Africa. That makes the design about 4,000 years old. Those early examples were single-path symbols rather than puzzles. True puzzle mazes with branches and dead ends became popular much later, especially in the hedge mazes of European gardens from the late 1600s onward.

What is the oldest surviving hedge maze?

Guinness World Records lists the maze at Hampton Court Palace near London as the oldest surviving hedge maze. It was planted in 1690 for King William III and Queen Mary II and designed by the royal gardeners George London and Henry Wise. The hedges were originally hornbeam and have since been repaired and partly replanted, mainly with yew. It covers about half an acre, with roughly half a mile of paths.

Was the labyrinth of the Minotaur real?

No one has found a building that matches the myth. The palace at Knossos on Crete, which stood in the Bronze Age, has many rooms and corridors, and excavators such as Minos Kalokairinos and later Arthur Evans linked it to the legend. Evans suggested that labyrinth meant House of the Double Axes. The Ashmolean Museum's 2023 exhibition presented it as an open question whether the labyrinth existed or grew from imagination.

What is the Chartres labyrinth?

The Chartres labyrinth is a large pavement labyrinth set into the floor of the nave of Chartres Cathedral in France. The University of Edinburgh dates it to about 1201 and calls it probably the most walked labyrinth in the world. It uses the eleven-circuit design that grew from earlier seven-circuit labyrinths. It has a single path, so walkers cannot get lost. It was made for slow, reflective walking rather than as a puzzle.

When was the first corn maze made?

The first corn maze in the United States is usually dated to 1993 in Annville, Pennsylvania. The Christian Science Monitor reports that it was a dinosaur shape cut into a three-acre field by students and staff at Lebanon Valley College to raise money for Midwest flood victims. Other accounts credit Don Frantz, working with English maze designer Adrian Fisher. Corn mazes then spread quickly, and many farms now design them with GPS.

What are turf mazes?

Turf mazes are paths cut into short grass, often on village greens or commons. They need regular re-cutting or the grass grows over them. Many follow a single-path labyrinth design. The University of Edinburgh notes that stone and turf labyrinths in northern Europe were largely laid down between the 12th and 17th centuries. In England, the turf maze at Saffron Walden has records of re-cutting going back to 1699.

Does keeping one hand on the wall always get you out of a maze?

Only in mazes where every wall connects to the outside edge. In those, following one wall continuously will always bring you to an exit. If a maze has islands, meaning sections of wall that are not connected to the outer edge, the wall follower can send you around the same loop again and again. Simple rules like always taking the first right turn have no guarantee at all, as the characters in Three Men in a Boat discovered at Hampton Court.

Sources

We checked every source below while writing this guide. Last reviewed October 30, 2026, by Joan Ramos.

1. Myths of the Labyrinth (Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford)
2. Stater of Knossos (1.1965.1986) (Harvard Art Museums)
3. Origins of Labyrinths (The University of Edinburgh)
4. Oldest hedge maze (Guinness World Records)
5. The Maze, Saffron Walden (National Heritage List for England, entry 1000741) (Historic England)
6. Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome, 1889) (Project Gutenberg)
7. Go get lost - and amazed in a maze (Sharon J. Huntington, 2004) (The Christian Science Monitor)
8. From the Great Sphinx to Jurassic World, Michigan corn mazes get creative (2015) (Michigan Public)