Prose

It was late afternoon in south Miami , and the sun, already sinking into the western sky, was bathing everything around us a pink light.

The guide stood on a block of carved coral, and in a grandiose manner, he waved his arms in order to encompass the extraordinary structure that surrounded us.

“This is Coral Castle ”, he shouted,
ensuring that the restless Japanese tourists at the back were taking it all in, “and it dates back to 1936”.

There were suitably impressed gasps from the collection of rubber-neckers as we dwelled on the possibility of anything in Miami being so old.  I tried my best to look impressed, but my thoughts flew from the stone walls, back to England and the ruins of castles that dated back to 1066.

Cowdray Castle in West Sussex was one that I had lived close to for three years and somewhere in the back of my mind
I had the dates 1520-29 which was the time it took to build. Doubtless there were teams of stone masons, workhorses, heavy wagons and a great deal of manpower. Meantime, the man who had built Coral Castle had taken twenty eight years to create this relatively small edifice. So what took him so long? The answer to that question is that he did it by himself – single handedly, and he
did it for love.

Edward Leedskalnin was born in Riga , Latvia in 1887 and by the age of 26 he was head over heels in love with sixteen year old Agnes Scuffs the only girl he ever wanted. For Edward, a life of
happiness stretched ahead, but the day before the wedding, Agnes proved to be as contrary as most sixteen year olds, and she changed her mind and walked out on him.

Edward was devastated, and having moved to America , he decided to create a tribute to Agnes, despite the fact that she never gave him so much as a second look. Setting to work on his
secluded property, he began carving and sculpting 1,100 tons of coral rock using only hand tools. He had come from a family of stone masons and knew a bit about moving large blocks around, and with very few people aware of what he was doing, his monument to love began to take shape.

However, Edward was an intensely private man, and when in 1936, the land nearby was purchased for a housing development, he decided that it was time for both he and his castle to move. It
was a journey of ten miles, but calling on a neighbor who had a tractor, and working mainly at night by lantern, Edward moved all the carved pieces of coral to their new home. Once in situ, he  then set about building a wall eight feet high, the sections of which are four feet wide, three feet thick and which weigh more than 58 tons.

Nobody ever saw him doing any carving, and present day engineers have very little idea as to how, single handed, he
raised these massive blocks into place. But Coral Castle stands to this day as a monument to a sixteen year old girl who frankly, my dear, didn’t give a damn.

So when you think of the ancient ruins of Merrie England and dwell upon the hundreds of years of history that have seeped into those towering walls, spare a thought for Edward Leedskalnin, a
modern man by historical standards, who replaced a young girl with a castle of his own. When he became ill at the age of 64, he pinned a note on the front door that simply said “Going to the hospital” from which he never returned.

Three days later, this slightly built, ordinary man slipped away from life, leaving behind a castle, with the words of the song “What I did for Love” echoing around its bougainvillea covered walls.