If life is a rock, foolish hands grasp a boulder

Recorded by Brother Wyn of Caermynach
Known As: The Rock and the Boulder
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

I first heard the saying as instruction, spoken plainly and without pause.

A waller was repairing a break in a boundary line where frost had lifted the stones and left the face loose. The ground there holds clay close to the surface, so the stones stay damp, even when the air is clear. A man helping him chose a large block with a clean edge and too much weight. He bent, set his fingers beneath it, and pulled.

The stone shifted, then settled back into place.

The waller looked up and said, If life is a rock, foolish hands grasp a boulder.

He said it plainly, with a look that suggested he had been caught by the same mistake once. I had the sense the words were not new to him.

The man loosened his grip and stepped back. His thumb rubbed once across his palm, slow and absent, before he reached for a smaller stone that sat well in the hand. It fitted the gap without argument, and the wall held.

I wrote the line down that night as I had heard it. I took it for work-speech, useful and local to the hands that spoke it, the sort of thing I might one day set aside for a later chronicle. I did not yet know that its source lay with one of those already under my hand.

Days later, on the ridge road above Buallt, I heard it again.

A drover was loading a cart for the descent, stacking stone higher than the wheels would forgive. He took one piece back down and set it aside, then said the line as if he were reminding himself. When I asked him to repeat it, he did so without hesitation, then bound the load and moved on.

That second time gave me pause. I wondered whether I had known the words before and only noticed them now that they had found a place in my mind. From there, I began to ask after them.

I spoke with drovers and with a bard who keeps the old ridge-names. I asked elders who remember where speech is said to come from. Each knew the saying, and none treated it as new. Just as I expected the answers to move outward, they came closer.

To my amazement, they said it was Tafod Ddu’s counsel, given to those over-eager to lift what could not yet be placed.

One elder spoke of Tafod stopping a lift with a word, then showing how a smaller stone, chosen with care, could carry the work forward. He could not keep the longer wording steady and did not try. He repeated only a short phrase, which he said Tafod used often:

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.

Caer Fawr and Caer Einion stand little more than six miles from Caermynach. I have walked their ground. I have touched stone set by hands that would have heard this counsel spoken where it mattered. To find such a saying still moving through speech so close to home held me longer than I expected.

The proverb lives now where it first made itself useful. It is spoken to interrupt careless haste, and used to correct a first choice before effort hardens it.

Those who speak it most readily tend to be the ones who no longer need it explained. They say it and wait for the correction.

Since then, I have wondered how many such counsels once moved among us and are now gone. How many were spoken cleanly, did their work, and 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 record this saying with care and a certain quiet pleasure. To find such old craft-speech still present in the lanes near Caermynach, still shaping work without calling attention to itself, reminds me how much lies close at hand.

To hear these words spoken from Tafod himself makes me shift a step. A few still living here remember the mountain of a 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 of us.