RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire is used to some unusual flights, but the arrival an hour before dawn of the An-225, the first ever British landing by this unique aircraft, created quite a stir. A sizeable media presence was there to see the unloading onto the specially made twenty-two axle Nooteboom low-loader and the huge convoy of cranes and marshalling vehicles which were to accompany it on its hundred-mile journey via the M40, M25 and A3. Although about the same length as a wind turbine blade, the cargo was much heavier. The convoy travelled at 10 miles an hour, accompanied by a five-mile tailback of frustrated drivers, until it finally left the A3 and headed into the Surrey countryside. The smaller roads to its final destination had been closed off in advance by arrangement with the police. The UK traffic management plan alone had cost half a million pounds, one of the smaller overheads of the exercise.

Onlookers lined the lanes as the lorry crawled the last three miles to Westgrave Hall. There, waiting for it were three giant eight-wheeled cranes, their jibs already arching into the sky over a half completed building. Teams of high-vis jacketed construction workers, helmeted in orange, oversaw the cargo’s final movement. It was a 300-yard lift from the road and into the building. That was not too far in general construction terms, but for the 240-tonne relic within, it was a monumental piece of travel. Arrangements took much of the day, and it was almost five in the afternoon, when the enormous silver-jacketed cargo was finally lifted from the low-loader, and manoeuvred across into the building that had been designed to receive it.

A lad on a bicycle stopped to watch, amazed at the hundreds of people who had gathered in this normally quiet rural lane. He pointed at the now suspended object, its huge shadow falling across the crowd in the late afternoon sunshine. ‘What’s in that thing?’ he asked no one in particular.

‘Haven’t you read the papers, Steven?’ replied Mary Hill, the verger of St Michael All Saints’ parish church. ‘It’s a giant fossil, 170 million years old.’

‘Is it a T. Rex?’

‘No. It’s a fish-eating plesiosaur, even bigger than a Tyrannosaurus.’

‘Cool!’

Mrs Hill’s husband Colin leaned towards the boy. ‘It is apparently, the largest one ever found. It used to swim in shallow tropical seas in what is now Central Asia.’

‘Why is it coming here?’ Steven replied, scratching his ear.

‘You’d better ask the Russian chap who owns Westgrave Hall,’ Colin replied.

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