Old Proverb: The foolish hand grasps a boulder
Recorded by Brother Wyn of Caermynach
Known As: Measure the breach, not the stone.
Date of Origin: Cymroth period, during the raising of Caer Fawr and Caer Einion
Status: Living proverb in ridge and lowland speech
Primary Source: Oral tradition of Buallt and the Twin Capitals
The Breach in the Wall
I watched a waller repairing a break in the boundary where the frost had lifted the stones, loosening the face. The ground in that corner held clay close to the top, so the rock was slick, even in the dry air. His helper reached straight for a heavy block with a clean, square edge. He worked his fingers under the rock, then pulled at it with all his strength.
The stone shifted, then settled back into place.
The waller laughed as he looked up. Then he said: “Foolish hands grasp a boulder.”
I had the sense that the words were not new to him.
The helper loosened his grip and stepped back. His thumb rubbed once across his palm, then he knelt and gathered three smaller stones, looking back at the breach each time. He bedded the first into the clay, turned the second to take the weight, and locked the course. Piece by piece, the smaller rocks took the shape of the gap, and the wall held.
On the Pengarreg Road
The words stayed with me that night, so I scribbled them among my working papers, thinking little more of it. Then, two days later, I heard them again on the Pengarreg road, just outside of Buallt.
A carter and his son had dropped a cartwheel into a rut at the edge of the wood. The son had an ash pole wedged under the axle, straining on the timber with his weight to lift the bed clear.
“Kick that boulder under,” he called out. “The big one by the ditch.”
The father stayed on his knees in the dirt. He had gathered three flat stones from the track. As the pole rose an inch, he slid the first flat piece beneath the axle. The son eased his grip to rest, heaved again, and the father slid the second flat stone over the first, securing the height.
The father seated the third flat stone into the stack and stood up. “Foolish hands grasp a boulder.”
The Lines at Caer Fawr
I asked around the drovers and down in Buallt. Every man pointed to the same source. They said it was Tafod Ddu’s, repeated on the work lines at Caer Fawr.
One elder spoke of Tafod stepping in, halting a heavy lift on the wall. He showed the men how smaller stone could raise the wall faster, if handled course by course. The elder remembered only the short rule of Tafod, handed down through countless generations:
Let’s not lift a boulder if a rock will do. For the smart mind leans to the shape of rocks, and through craft and repetition, two hands can move many mountains.
Surviving the Stone
Caer Fawr and Caer Einion stand little more than six miles from Caermynach. I have walked in the old city, dating back almost as far as Babel itself. The stones are all but gone now, and it was a pleasant surprise to find such a saying can outlast the highest of walls. But when I think about it, it is no surprise at all. What is it to be Welsh, if not to be a walking vessel for the songs and stories that will outlast time itself?
The proverb now lives close to the place where it was first used. It is spoken to interrupt careless haste, and used to correct a first choice before effort and the strength of a stubborn arm turns it to stone.
Since then, I wonder how many such sayings that once moved among us are now gone. How many were spoken, did their work, but were never written. Words that held for a moment, then slipped away.
This one remains, which I think is a good thing.
Final Entry
I must confess that I record this saying with a certain quiet pleasure. To find such old wisdom still present in the lanes near Caermynach reminds me that even the smallest lessons we pass on can outlast our own legacy, long after we are in the ground.
To hear these words spoken from Tafod himself makes me pause. A few still living here remember the man he was, and what moved when he set his hand to it. Although I will not celebrate what he became, I acknowledge that Middle Wales took its shape under the guidance of Tafod Ddu, and our language with it.
We can still learn lessons from the fall of the very best among us.
