York Maze is a

maze A maze is a path or collection of paths, typically from an entrance to a goal. The word is used to refer both to branching tour puzzles through which the solver must find a route, and to simpler non-branching ("unicursal") patterns that lea ...

constructed from

maize Maize ( ; ''Zea mays'' subsp. ''mays'', from es, maíz after tnq, mahiz), also known as corn (North American and Australian English), is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. Th ...

located off the

B1228 road B roads are numbered routes in Great Britain of lesser importance than A roads. See the article Great Britain road numbering scheme The Great Britain road numbering scheme is a numbering scheme used to classify and identify all roads in G ...

near Elvington in England.

History

The maze is owned by former farmer Tom Pearce who had the idea to construct a maze after seeing an advert for a "maize maze". Pearce had been looking to diversity after his entire beef herd had to be killed due to

bovine spongiform encephalopathy Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is an incurable and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. Symptoms include abnormal behavior, trouble walking, and weight loss. Later in the course of t ...

. Formerly located in

Heslington Heslington is a suburban village and civil parish within the City of York district, in the ceremonial county of North Yorkshire, England, south-east of the centre of York. Before 1974, it was a village in the Derwent Rural District, which was pa ...

, Pearce was required to vacate the land to make way for the third campus of the

University of York , mottoeng = On the threshold of wisdom , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £8.0 million , budget = £403.6 million , chancellor = Heather Melville , vice_chancellor = Charlie Jeffery , students ...

. It was at this point that Pearce purchased the area of land where the maze is now sited. The maze opened at its current location in 2008. The maze was originally designed on paper and mapped out using sticks and string. In 2006, Pearce began using

GPS The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a Radionavigation-satellite service, satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of t ...

to create the maze which made the process easier and allowed for more complex shapes.

Theme

References

{{Coord, 53, 56, 14.82, N, 0, 59, 16.98, W, display=title Mazes in the United Kingdom 2002 establishments in England Tourist attractions in North Yorkshire