"If you build it, he will come," goes the famous opening of the novel and film Field of Dreams, wherein an Iowa farmer builds a baseball pitch in the corner of his cornfield in the hope a famous team will return from the past and play.
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The corner of Donegan's Farm might not see Shoeless Joe Jackson wander back from history, but there is a cornfield undergoing a transformation that the public can enjoy, involving food, drinks and live music.
Graze in the Maize is an opportunity for the public to spend Sunday evenings in February finding their way through two hectares of thickly-planted cornstalk to an oasis of open space where entertainment is offered.
WATCH THE VIDEO FROM ABOVE, BELOW (IT MIGHT TAKE A MOMENT TO LOAD)
Owners of Gordon's Donegan's Farm Josie and Peter Donegan have gone to extraordinary lengths to sow and raise the maize, which is a 140-day variety, Peter says, ensuring it is irrigated and fertilised well enough to raise it quickly. Sown in November, it's now - almost - as high as an elephant's eye.
But more astonishingly, the 'maze in the maize' was created without the use of a GPS system or anything more technical than a map of the design on a piece of paper and lines of sight.
The maze, which is constructed out of a series of words written - well, mowed - in copperplate typeface, was created by Peter Donegan on a mower.
"I first did it 10 years ago," says Peter,"but I wrote all the 'a's back-to-front."
This time Josie directed Peter while he cut the maze into the corn - "just go around there in a big curve and come back to me," was a typical direction, she says.
"That's an 'e'. Now go that way, and then go that way. OK that's a 'z'."
The Graze in the Maize evenings will run on the Sundays of February 2, 9, 16 and 23 from 3pm to 8pm, with different musical acts at each gathering in Gordon.
"People can choose to find their way to the food and bar in the middle of the maze by taking the long way through - or there's a bit of a shortcut too, if they are thirsty," says Josie Donegan.
"Really, if they want, people can just sit in the middle of the field and relax in the peace and quiet."
At the end of its glamorous life as a maize maze and live music venue, the cornfield will go to a much more prosaic end - cut down and harvested for feeding cattle, which apparently love the taste of fresh corn kernels.
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