Summer Solstice Sunrise over Bora Maze
The nine men's morris is filled up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.
~ William Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
After completing our new labyrinth to mark the Summer Solstice (together with a brilliant team of 18 volunteers) at White Island Bar as part of the long maze-building tradition on St Martins, we had to check if it would really align with the rising sun on Midsummer morning. Technically, we were a day too late (June 22nd, not 21st) but the sun rises at the same point for a few days around the solstice (the name "solstice" comes from the Latin word "solstitium," meaning "sun standing still") so we were confident the alignment would still work - providing that we had actually put the labyrinth in the right place.
This meant a 4.30am wakeup call and a groggy walk from the campsite across the island to the new labyrinth, where we waited nervously to see whether our calculations for the day before were accurate. We had been down at sunset the previous night but low cloud on the horizon meant the setting sun was invisible. Similar banks of cloud were drifting about this morning, and we were worried the same thing might happen again.
Our spirits were greatly improved by the arrival of Simon, one of our volunteers from the day before, who had also braved the early dawn to come and see if the alignment worked.
At first, all seemed lost. The sky directly behind the closest hill of White Island was brightening the fastest, and it was looking as though our angle was way out. How embarrassing! We should have done as our ancestors did and measure the point of sunrise with sticks in the ground for many days before hand, to get it just right, rather than relying on an iPhone app for our sun alignment.
But then - as if by magic - we saw the first bright red edge of the sun begin to drag itself over the horizon! Almost exactly where we had predicted it would be! We were overjoyed. We made a slight tweak of a couple of degrees to the line of stones protruding from the far point of the labyrinth, just to make sure it was dead on the sunrise line, and glowed with pride and relief.
Later that day we hosted a sharing event at the Seven Stones Inn to talk about the Scilly Labyritnth project, where we were joined by many of the volunteers from the previous day, plus some fresh faces too. One of the questions asked to us was what we were going to name the new labyrinth. We hadn’t thought to name it anything, but together we came up with a list of suggestions that we felt epitomised the spirit of the day we spent making the labyrinth: midsummer, woven stories, collaboration, unity, elopement, sun, dawn, sunrise, light.
We took this list of names away and found Cornish translations for each of the words. Scilly has a mix of Cornish and English place names, but we thought that choosing a Cornish name would be a nice touch. Eventually we decided that “Bora Maze” sounded best, this means “Sunrise Labyrinth” hinting at the fact that it aligns with Midsummer Sunrise.
