What do I do when I am in Sweden? Well, for some of the time I move boulders which are in inconvenient positions. This one was a danger to traffic, on a turning circle where it could have damaged tyres and wheels. So it had to go. It wasn't actually bluestone -- it was a typical bluish schist as found all over the Stockholm Archipelago. I reckon it weighed about 800 kg. I have moved bigger ones in my time, but this was quite enough effort for an old codger like me........ Seriously hard work.
What you need is a spade, a strong crow-bar so thick that it will not bend (this is your lever), and loads of smaller stones and bits of wood which will be used as packing materials as the stone rises, bit by bit, very slowly, from its original embedded position until it can be rolled away from the hole. You have to lever the stone up from all sides, sometimes just a few cm at a time, to get it out of the hole.
I hate to think how difficult an operation like this must have been before the invention of iron bars and metal spades. A standing stone 2m high would have involved a much deeper pit than this, and I imagine that the "backfill" would have consisted mostly of smaller boulders back in the Neolithic, or bits of wood that have since rotted away, or a mixture of both.
With regard to the supposed sockets at Waun Mawn (at least eight of them, according to MPP), I did not see anything to convince me that any of the slight depressions ever did hold a standing stone. Mike Pitts was quite right to question the "lost circle" research as being fundamentally flawed on this basis alone.
The only positive thing I can say about these hollows is that some of them might have held embedded erratic boulders which were taken away to be used somewhere else.
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