Exploring the engineering advancements of the medieval era, the book delves into the ingenuity of craftsmen who constructed remarkable structures using only manual labor and basic tools. It highlights the challenges faced and innovations achieved during a time when technology was rudimentary, showcasing the skill and creativity that defined pre-industrial engineering.
The opening up of huge iron ore finds in the Hammersley Ranges in the nineteen sixties has led to the need for major new infrastructure, including railways to convey the ore several hundred miles to the coast. Having won the contract to build a vital rail bridge in the Pilbara, a remote area in Western Australia, Victorian based firm Richardson Constructions experience a number of traumatic incidents severely disrupting the early work and culminating in the death, likely murder, of a senior rig operator. Senior site engineer Jim Pike believes the incidents are being orchestrated by Bull Masters, boss of an old established construction company in Western Australia to try and force him and, ultimately, Richardson Constructions off the site. In confronting Masters at his nearby station homestead he encounters an unwelcome familiar face and events that threaten his return to the bridge site, now beset with strike problems, cyclonic weather and difficult geological conditions imperilling foundation operations using a new type of piling rig vital to the success of the whole project.