Just arrived back from Derby. I'll try to give a summary of both days.

Yesterday was quite cool with a strong wind, but it stayed fine and by the afternoon it had warmed up a little. The block arrived late and they took a long time with a crane getting it off the lorry and into the field. It was about 10:30 before we started doing anything with it. As you can see from the pictures, we dug three "rabbit holes" along each side to get the levers under the stone. We had to keep adding small stones under the levers as they became squashed into the ground at each attempt to lift. Eventually we got enough in to get the block slightly off the ground. Small packing pieces were inserted under the block and more stones under the levers until we reached a height where the first fulcrum logs could be inserted. You can follow the rest of the progress in the photo sequence.

We rowed a few strokes quite successfully and achieved a distance of 38 inches. However, we encountered a problem in that the "oars" kept slipping too far under the block. which made it very hard to manoeuver them. It was decided to make notches in the top of the oars to stop this happening, but that weakened them to the point that they began to split along their length.

The film crew were quite happy at that point, having seen the principle work successfully albeit only for a short distance. We completed the 38" in around 2 minutes, so that's equivalent to 32 yards per hour. I'm sure with practice we could easily get up to 100 yards per hour once the problem with the oars was solved.

Today the weather was gorgeous. Many of us got more than just a touch of the sun. We started by raising the block until it was level. This took a considerable amount of time because the site had a slope of 1 in 18 and we had to wait for Gordon to procure a quantity of different thicknesses of packing pieces. They ranged from plywood and floorboard right through to short lengths of railway sleepers. In fact it was early afternoon before the block was levelled and raised onto the first layer of support poles.

After that progress was more rapid, but even so, the lack of an adequate team meant that instead of a clean lift of the whole block at once, we had to proceed by lifting one side and then the other, which often meant repositioning levers, people and support poles. It probably took about three times longer than it would if we'd had enought people for the full lift.

By about 3:00pm, we had raised the block a total of 31.5 inches (80cm). Even though it was completely stable on it's base, we couldn't risk leaving it at this height in the field overnight, so it was decided that we needed to spend the rest of the afternoon dismantling what we had built. This was something of a disappointment, since otherwise we could probably have raised it at least another couple of feet or so in the time we had left.

It actually didn't take very long to get it down, but at least that left us time to pat each other on the back, drink a glass (or rather a plastic cup) of champagne each, and discuss plans for next time!

Congratulations to everyone who took part and commiserations to all of those who couldn't make it.

Steve