I was not at the Foamhenge experiment so cannot comment on the possible advantage of one transportation technique over another. But assuming for a moment that the bluestones were transported from Preseli wouldn't a combination of transportation techniques make sense? If, along the route, there was water to cross the transportation technique would obviously be different to moving the stone over hard ground, and different again over soft, and possibly different again going up or down hill, during winter or in the summer.

The people who transported the bluestones probably knew when the best time to move them was (personally I'd opt for winter) and probably knew what the best rout was to take. But that isn't to say that they wouldn't have varied the transportation technique to take advantage of the conditions. Isn't that what we do after all every time we drive a car? With the advantage of wheels and an engine we don't have to worry about the sheer brute force required to get us from A to B but we don't drive in the same gear all the way, and we modify our driving to the conditions outside. Put another way, if we were stranded on a desert island and had to get a log down from the mountains to the shore we'd use anything that would give us an advantage - rolling, dragging, pushing, floating it down stream. Come to think of it, that's still how logs in some part of the world are transported today - things may not have changed that much after all :-)

I expect your right.

I must be a troll. I have the nerve to ridicule a daft idea. No one else would think to do such a thing to somebody else's ideas would they.

Completely troll free zone until I arrived.

Steve proposed it as a workable idea. I disagree.

Personaly I don't see any reason to believe that they had the rope to the length and strength required. It would have been entirly handmade, not produced on a machine as in Chatham and Norway.

But putting that aside..

50 ropes leading back to the stone 5cm in diameter. What are you going to tie it off to? It would have to be a frame or seldge and whatever it is Your tie off point has to be strong enough to take the weight of the stone the sledge and the friction of the ground and there has to be enough room to tie your ropes...

The problem with 50 teams of Oxen is they will get in each others way. If they are in a straight line any sideways movement of the leading animals will cause the rope to catch those following. If you fan them out then you are adding a side pressure and lowing the forward pressure. unless you can equalize the pressure the stone will drift in the direction of the great pressure.

With them fanned out how are you going to organise steering. There are 50 farmers out there each one trying to control their pair. Logistical nightmare

Don't forget to concider how long these ropes would need to be and how long it would take to make and why on Earth any farmer would need rope that long

That brilliant picture that Nigel posted shows how you use teams of Oxen . The Romans used trains of up to twenty. and it only takes one man to control them, not 50.

But that brings us back to the same problem as the start. How do you connect the teams to the stone. If you used 5 teams of 20, the rope would need to take - what, 10 ton's of pressure? and I'm pretty certain they didn't have any of that.

On entirly practical grounds I don't believe it would work.

If thats antagonistic, then I'm a Dutchman.

Tony