The Great Stone Block Race

There was a stone wall of old red sandstone blocks near where I lived, which was apparently the former ancestral home of my Mum's side of the family, here in a little Welsh village called Llanllyfni, in North Wales.



The objective was to take "stone from the wall" (the exact words) and transport the material to a field near Maes Castell, right about here:-


- and, once in the field, to put the material so collected on the paddle end of a small red-painted oar which had been laid in the field. The first person to lay a stone from the wall onto the oar would win a prize.

There were a half dozen of the locals staggering along excruciatingly slowly, dressed in working men's clothes, grunting and sweating as they carried these huge blocks of red sandstone in their arms. Me, I wasn't carrying any blocks. So I just nimbly brushed past them, sprinted to the bottom of the road, clambered down the grassy embankment, crossed the road, vaulted the stone wall on the opposite side, entered the field, crossed to where the oar lay on the grass ...

... and scattered some small red sandstone pebbles from my pocket onto the oar.

One of the officials confirmed, by looking closely at the pebbles, that they were indeed "stone taken from the old wall," which meant I had won the prize. I never got the chance to figure out what that prize was, because I woke up at that point, presumably leaving the villagers and the judges feeling really pissed off at my ingenuity and my going with expediency following suit with the herd. I presume if I have the same dream next year, I'm liable to be disqualified because the committee will have come up with a rules change in the interim or something.