32. How We Learnt To Move Rocks

A Memoir in 65 Postcards & The Recovery Diaries

This is how we did it. Telegraph poles and railway sleepers, an engineer taught us how to use a windlass; a rope looped around a stone and a tree, and tightened with a stick turned clockwise, a coordination of hands to keep it winding and stop it snapping out of control and spinning anticlockwise; an arm was broken once, and once the rope broke and whipped me. But first we had to lever each stone from the pile. We used wooden poles to inch our way under, another pole, bigger and so on, inch by inch we lifted those stones onto telegraph poles placed crossways on sleepers that led to a hole in the ground at least half as deep as each stone was tall so that when it fell it would not be moving again except by rabbits who nibble and tip in that quiet way that builds mountains and digs canyons. A hundred people on a rope, rocks hauled along tracks, a bridge built across grass for a Portland stone to float towards a spot chosen by our Megalithic Giant that would mark a rise of the moon. Five hundred people on a hill for a month, living on campfire cooking and starting each day with The Dance of Life. Meetings – oh god the meetings. A talking stick, an endless circle of discussion from who isn’t doing the washing up to which stone cares that it broke in half. We had to hold a ceremony for that. The Megalithic Giant convinced us to let him try levitation. It didn’t work but we had fun. Uri Geller got in touch, invited us to his house of obscene crystals and damn spoons and boasted he’d magic the stones into place but, guess what, he never turned up. It wasn’t the showmen who got those stones moved but the engineers who spoke quietly, who knew that no fancy trickery is going to get around the moment when a nine-ton rock reaches a hole in the ground and falls in. If it lands at an angle that’s it. You can move a stone across grass but it takes more than an armful of chanting Pagans to push a rock vertical that has landed at a slant. You can’t do it. As each stone fell, we held our breath, as each landed perfectly we cheered and the tamping sticks moved in, and the didgeridoos played and the drums beat and beneath each stone is buried something to make each of us who were there smile and tease the archaeologists of a thousand years from now.