32. How We Learnt To Move Rocks

The Obsessive Diary · Oct 13, 2025 · 2m

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…