Danger -- engineers at work

Dick Parry's rollers

Cliff Osenton's supporting frame and log rollers

Richard Atkinson's sledge 1958

 Cuban "wedge sledge"  -- Len Saunders

Bruce Bedlam's roller

Garry Levin's wickerwork roller

 Bruce's balls

The Millennium Stone sledge 2000 -- used on roads with low-friction netting

 Above -- Alan Sorrell -- 1958 for Atkinson et al -- rack and rollers, and lots of strong men with very long ropes.......

The Millennium Stone Pull, 2000.  Note the vast amounts of low friction Netlon being used to enable the sledge to slide properly.  On this day (when I was involved!) the sledge went out of control on the hill you can see in the background, and this pic was taken shortly after the crash.  There weren't enough people with braking ropes at the back. 

Luckily nobody was hurt.... 

Rodney Castelden's ox sledge and bogey -- needing 24 oxen for the haulage of a sarsen.  Presumably the haulage of bluestones would have needed fewer oxen and a simpler rig?

The "conveyor stone" system, in which a row of bluestones acts as a "firm roadway" for other stones to be moved along from the back of the row to the front, through the use of rollers.  Nice idea, but on rough terrain, with rough and irregularly shaped stones....?

 Phil Morgan's Contraption.  Basically a rocking A-frame capable of moving a bluestone on a sledge forward by a few feet at a time.  Tested July 2011 at St Fagan's.

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I have been pondering on what a splendid cottage industry we now have in the UK, involving enthusiastic teams of engineers and presumably underwritten by substantial quantities if public money.  Not that I'm complaining -- I'd rather see money spent on this than on Trident submarines, for example.  But just think of the thousands and thousands of hours of intellectual effort have gone into all of this -- not to mention the sweated labour (usually involving groups of students.)

There are a number of interesting themes coming through here. 

One -- some of the experiments don't use stones at at all, let alone irregular stones such as those in the bluestone assemblage at Stonehenge.   

Two -- there is frequent "cheating" especially through the use of modern ropes, used in great lengths both for lashing rollers and frames together, and for pulling sledges along.  OK -- so what these guys are doing is attempting to "establish a principle" that works -- but can you really imagine Bruce Bedlam's roller working, for example, with Neolithic ropes made of twisted bramble stalks or animal gut?  Hmmm.......

Three --  the use of asphalt roadways or hard surfaces is rather too common for comfort.  And on the Millennium Stone pull, in which I was involved, the organizers had to resort to the use of low-friction nylon netting to facilitate the movement of the sledge with its bluestone, and used just asphalt roadways and good farm tracks for the haulage route.

Four -- there are some other wonderful impracticalities, the most wonderful of which is Bruce Bradley's ballbearing and railway track idea, which requires not only a trackway with a near-perfect groove cut in it, but also large quantities of IDENTICAL stone or wooden ballbearings.  Now that's something I really DO object to taxpayer's money being used for......

Five -- too many flat and even fields and rolling chalk downs for comfort.  One or two of the trials did involve haulage up slopes, but not one of the tests thus far has come anywhere near replicating the assumed haulage of stones across a heavily-wooded landscape with peat bogs, rocky outcrops and stone litters, sticky clay depressions, steep slopes, waterlogged woodland clearings, cataracts and streams with alternating torrents and shallows.  Some of the experimenters need to come to Pembrokeshire and have a look round.... I will be happy to act as a local guide, just in case the natives prove to be hostile and choose to target them with spears and arrows......

SO WHEN IS SOMEBODY GOING TO DO AN AUTHENTIC EXPERIMENT, USING NEOLITHIC MATERIALS AND A PROPER LUMP OF SPOTTED DOLERITE OR RHYOLITE, ACROSS AUTHENTIC TERRAIN?

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Sorry guys -- you have had fun, and some of your techniques might have worked on Salisbury Plain, but I have seen nothing yet, in all the info about these engineering experiments, to convince me that large numbers of bluestone pillars could have been moved for one mile through the Neolithic jungles of central Pembrokeshire, let alone for the epic journey so beloved of EH and miriads of otherwise sensible people.  The more I think about it, the more convinced am I that ALL of the stones used at Stonehenge were gathered up and transported across a relatively limited area of Salisbury Plain.  Even there, the Neolithic terrain would have been far more difficult than it is today, so that might well have placed a real constraint upon the maximum distance across which the haulage of stones was worthwhile.