Thanks everyone for your comments. Oh boy, it's never an easy one is it! I totally agree the 308 is a very versatile round and very common. If my memory is right, a 150grn bullet does a proper job but with less damage than a lighter, faster round. I just fancy trying the 6.5 as everyone who has one swears by them, very accurate, nice to shoot and a good sized round without being too hyper.
How common is the 6.5 in a shop these days for ammo and how does the barrel fair?
The meat damage issue is a red herring in choosing which calibre to buy. One thing you'll notice is that people tend to recommend that which they own.
As for meat damage, you can shoot a deer with the 100gr .243 bullet and do more or less meat damage than if you'd used a 150gr .308 bullet or a 140gr 6.5/7mm bullet. Much depends on impact velocity, a lot depends on bullet construction, even more depends on where you hit the beast and what the bullet passes through once inside the beast (bone, heart, lungs, liver - they all behave differently), and lastly it depends on the day of the week. OK, that last one isn't true.
For example, I shot a roe low in the heart with a 165gr bullet from my 30-06 and it made an awful mess. Not so much bloodshot meat as stomach content everywhere. That roe was shot at about 60 yards. The following year, my frieind shot a hind through the heart/lungs with the same bullet from the same rifle and it made almost no damage at all, a bloodshot area of ribs about 6 inches across. That hind was shot at about 180 yards. You can't compare one to the other apart from saying sometimes that a given bullet makes a mess and other times it doesn't. It generally is irrelevant whether the bullet was 6mm, 6.5mm, 7mm, or 7.62mm. Why do I say this? Read on.
Some years ago, four of us shot 16 red hinds with various different bullets fired from three .243 rifles (using four different types of bullet) and a 30-06. We examined the carcasses in the game larder each day and at the end of the week and no one would have been able to say which beast had been shot with which calibre or what bullet. All of them (except two neck shots) were shot through the heart and lungs and the damage to each (entry and exit holes and internal damage) was much the same.
I once shot a roe at about 70 yards just above the heart with a 150gr RN bullet (chosen on the basis that it was a big slow heavy bullet) from my 7-08 and it made an awful mess. That's because I hit the foreleg bones. Others with the same bullet and it made relatively little damage, because it only hit ribs and the aorta/lungs.
I once shot two Scottish roe through the heart with a 55gr bulet from my 223 and it made minimum damage. One was shot at about 40 yards, the other around 180 yards.I don't doubt that if I hit the foreleg of a roe with that bulet it's make an unholy mess. Bullet placement is everything.
So in short, it's a falsehood to say "this cartridge causes more or less meat damage than that cartridge" if for no other reason than the assertion cannot be proven. It's just an opinion, possibly based on experience, possibly not. It isn't the cartridge that does the damage, it's the bullet. Diameter, within limits, is irrelevant. Bullet placement and bullet construction, in that order, are the governing factors.
There is no reason not to go for a 6.5x55 if that's what you fancy, it is perfectly capable of taking any game in the UK. My only comment would be that the action of a 6.5x55 will be a bit longer than a .308-based cartridge (i.e. .243 Win, .260 Rem, 7-08 Rem) so the gap between the receiver bridge and hence scope rings will be a bit wider and that might impact your choice of scope or scope mounting. You might need offset or stepped bases but that's no problem.
As for ammunition availability, that shouldn't be any problem. Larger dealers should have it in stock and even if you had to get your local dealer to order it, and you bought 200 rounds at a time, you won't run short. The 6.5x55 is one of Europe's more common calibres and most if not all of the manufacturers make it.
-JMS
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