Buildup to Spring

We're taking advantage of winter's customary garden devastation to tidy around and make a few changes to the place before spring growth takes hold. Pictured is the start of a new low dry stone wall I'm putting up to edge the patio at the point at which it drops off to the bottom garden. I've shifted a couple of decent sized boulders from by the woodshed at bottom right, which in itself is long overdue as I've been tripping over the buggers for years now. I used a technique shown to me by an old Anglesey farmer about twenty-five years ago. I say old, but I realise in retrospect that he was about the same age as I am now, at the time. Which I guess qualifies as old, I suppose. It's a simple and very safe way of moving field stones perhaps twice as heavy as one could normally manage to lift, at my age at least, so good for a weight of 80-150kg. I can still manage to lift fifty kilos at a pinch, although I doubt very much I could carry that uphill over rough ground for half a mile, as I was capable of in my prime: lift it yes, do much with it, most definitely no these days.

Anyhow, the stones we were trying to shift on that day a quarter of a century ago, were also going to be for garden use, to edge an enormous raised bed we were building for a couple at Llangristiolous. The stones were proving intractable for even the two us building the thing, so the guy at the house called on his mate, the farmer next door, to show us how to get the job done without plant hire. The fella that rocked up was no taller than about five-foot-eight and very slight of build. He was however, as wiry a man as I've seen: all sinew, and work, rather than gym-hardened, muscle. And he turned up with just a wheelbarrow and a long bar.

He simply raised up one long side of the boulder to be moved with the iron bar, using a smaller stone as a fulcrum, one of us lay the barrow on its side, with the stones edge just over the lip. He then lowered the boulder onto the lip of the barrow, then he grabbed the opposite side of the barrow, whilst the other crabbed the stone further into the barrow with the bar, from the back. He then simply righted the barrow using its wheel and leg as the fulcrum, with the other person on the bar helping it home. Once past the tipping point, the weight of the stone completes the job itself. Smaller stones - sixty, seventy kilos, such as the ones I've shifted this afternoon - can easily be managed on your own with care. Obviously this technique only works easily for stones up to the length of the barrow itself, but it works beautifully on the smaller stuff. I'll keep you posted on progress...