Above: visiting a village in the south-west of the county I went into the church and saw this Norman font that was carved with unusual symbols.
Above: looking more closely at the symbols there seemed to be something familiar about the arrangement of swirls and triangles (also note the symbolic stars on the left).
Above: they reminded me strongly of the symbols I saw on the great stones at Newgrange in the Boyne Valley (in West Britain).
Above: reading more about Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange, the sites are enigmatic and the symbols obscure. The dating seems to be inconsistent (it varies in whichever book you read). I can't really remember much about my own trip to Newgrange except that it was a morning coach tour and the person sitting next to me fell asleep and virtually laid on me - I was only about seventeen, and not very assertive.
Above: this Nuba woman has had her hair cut in a maze design. When I saw the reports of the maze discovered by the National Trust at Lyveden New Bield I thought of this woman's hair. What is going on here?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/nov/06/luftwaffe-spy-tudor-garden-lyveden
Above: in his wonderful book Vergil, Epic and Anthropology W F Jackson Knight analyses the cultural significance of the maze, tracing it back to ancient Illium (Troy).
The film Troy (2004) shows the fight between Achilles (Brad Pitt) and Hector (Eric Bana) but gets wrong the way Achilles drags Hector around the city (according to WF Jackson Knight this is a symbolic ritual connected to the labyrith at Illium).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIxTAqI2CpY
Above: I recently read Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand. Brand's argument is that humanity should plan for the next ten thousand years. And this made me think that I have been too self-limited in tracing the origins of modern behaviour back to the medieval period - it should be possible to look back ten thousand years (and perhaps the concept of the maze is a good place to start).
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