Discovering the lost Garrison Labyrinth on St Mary’s
As part of our research into Scilly’s labyrinth heritage, we asked the Scilly Memories Facebook page if anyone had any memories or photographs of Scilly’s labyrinths. And we were met with an intriguing mystery: a resident of St Mary’s shared this image from a 1960s National Geographic article, of her sister and cousin playing in a maze on the Garrison on St Mary’s, which has long since disappeared.
Photograph of the (now lost) Garrison Labyrinth on St Mary’s by regular contributing photographer Bates Littlehales, in National Geographic magazine. July 1967 edition, page 130.
She told us that the maze was located “by George Boscawens Battery - the larger of the Garrison Batteries - just down from the opening, towards the cliff.”
So - armed with this information, the photograph, and a little encouragement from Jeff Saward from Labyrinthos.net - we set off to find the site of the lost Garrison labyrinth.
One sunny morning we took a brief detour from the route of a guided walk around the Garrison with some of the members of Scilly’s Community Archaeology Group to see if we could find the maze.
By lining up the rocks on the coastline visible in the old photograph, we were able to find the rough location of the labyrinth. The perspective confused us for a while, until we realised that the photographer must have taken the photograph by standing on top of the Garrison wall, and looking down on the labyrinth’s coils. Teän climbed up on the wall and Layan and Alison took up the positions of the cousin and sister to recreate the photograph.
One member of the group said that she could remember some lumps and bumps in this spot, when she was a child visiting Scilly in the 1970s, which must have been the vanishing remains of the maze.
No trace of it is left under the thick grass now.
Site of the lost maze rediscovered with the help of some volunteers from the Isles of Scilly Community Archaeology Group.
Jeff Saward has recently used this information to update his (frankly indispensable) article about Scilly’s labyrinths The Isles of Scilly Troy Towns to include the location of the vanished Garrison Labyrinth. Here he notes that the photograph was taken by regular National Geographic photographer Bates Littlehales during a research trip to Scilly in 1966, and was published in the magazine’s July 1967 edition on page 130.
The caption that ran with it was intriguing: “Mysterious maze by St. Mary’s shore puzzles even the islanders. One theory: Bored British Soldiers shaped it about 1800.”
While Jeff thinks the date of 1800 is unlikely to be accurate (and it is more likely contemporaneous with the other mazes of the created in the late 1950s or early 1960s), this does lend weight to our earlier findings that a) even the islanders are unsure of the origin of these mazes and b) the idea that they were made by bored servicemen who were stationed on the islands is a popular one.
