LOOKING FOR A MAZE

Yesterday afternoon Yvonne and I took the dog for a walk on Putenham Common. Readers may have heard of the Hogs Back - a chalk ridge between Farnham and Guidlford. Indeed Daniel Defoe wrote about it in dramatic terms - he hated heights.

In the geological sequence the next rock down is Upper Greensand and thats where Putenham Common fits in - its on the Upper Greensand south of the Hogs Back. Its also on the Pilgrims Way, a route from Winchester to Canterbury. You find the chapels on the Upper Greensand ridge rather than the chalk and G K Chesterton wrote a whole book around this - called The Old Road. In particular there is St Martha's on the other side of the River Wey - this is the only chapel in the UK dedicated to her. She was an early martyr who fought a dragon in Aix in France.

There are at least two ancient remains on the Common - one is a Roman guardpost which I think I found once with the children. The other is a maze which in the 16th century was used by young men and women of the area for a dancing etc. My source for this is a Dover reprint of a history of mazes originally published in the 1920s by an antiquarian who lived in north Middlesex. I have never found the maze.

Today its back to work. This is an excuse to mention the maze which was nearest to my office in Victoria - in Tothill fields. This maze is shown in a 17th century drawing. I once went to the Westminster archive which is just behind the DTI HQ near Westminster Abbey. The staff were very helpful. We got as far as locating the bill which was paid by the local parish council at the end of the 17th century to refurbish the maze. At a guess the use of mazes for frolics was something that Cromwell would have frowned on and so with the Restoration it might have been back on the agenda. Another possibility is that the maze got damaged when Cromwell kept Scottish prisoners in Tothill Fields during the Civil War.

I have a pet theory as to where the Tothill maze was - completely speculative. The Tot in Tothill is linked to the saxon word for meeting place - Tooting in south London is another example of this saxon use. In Aldeburgh there is a Toot Hall on the seafront.

The London maze is close to an intersection of two allignments. The first is from the White Tower through Southwark Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. I agree three points is not all that impressive to claim allignment - but these three could hardly be better. The second allignment is at right angles and goes through the mound on Hampstead Heath where legend has it that Boadaciea is buried and St James Palace. But it also takes in a boundary line which runs through the middle of Regents Park - but I must confess I have never I have never checked out the history of that boundary. Some are very old - there's one for example between Kent and Surrey around the are where the M25 which follows the line of a Roman Road which no longer exists on the surface at all.

So, these two allignments - at ninety degrees - converge on some spot on Tothill Fields and thats where I like to think the maze was. This could be at a point on Horseferry Road which is old as the name suggests and still exists as a higher level than the surrounding streets. There is a point where it swings through ninety degrees to go East to the river, where presumably the ferry was across to Lambeth Palace. That point is a possibility eg when you look at the seventeenth century drawing.

More about Thames crossings another time.