If the wheel — its invention, putting it to use — be reckoned the single most important, the most fundamentally enabling, step in the evolution of civilisation, where does that put the wheelbarrow in the history of gardening? Or in the history of anything, of everything really? Nineteenth century railway embankments? Eighteenth century canals? Capability Brown dragging a hill a bit this way, or digging a lake over there? Unthinkable without wheelbarrows. The draining of the fens, the making of theGreat Ouse, in the seventeenth century? Imagine life now without earth-movers, mechanical diggers, JCBs. Unthinkable! But what about Maiden Castle, what about Silbury Hill? The earth there was probably dug and lugged by slaves ... or their equivalent. And that's not something to celebrate, not at all. Only the wheelbarrow would have eased the labour. The wheelbarrow, the liberator, the engine of man's progress.
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