Word search

Back in October I blipped a stone wall topped with quartz lumps like this one, such as are common in my locality.

I explained that somewhere I had come across the word babalwbi   (babaloobi) for these ornamental white rocks that are a vernacular building feature on walls and gateposts in some areas of Wales, but I'd lost track of where I'd found that information. And that now when I searched online the trail led back to my own reference, as if I had come across my own footprints while out walking.

But a local friend took up the challenge and contacted a Welsh stone waller who supplied the following via his blog.
"Babalwbi is in fact Limestone and it is the so called ‘pavement’ of exposed limestone which has been eroded into the gentle curvy shapes much favoured as a wall topping in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the long terraces of the dark industrial valleys where its brightness must have added some cheer to the sombre dark grey and brown of the Pennant sandstone. It is illegal today to remove it from its natural environment. It can seen in many areas of the western Brecon Beacons in the limestone uplands of the Swansea valley for instance. Quartzite is also very popular in areas where it occurs such as you mention. Only this last weekend I was moving old slabs of babalwbi in a garden near Carreg Cennen castle, believe me, it is HEAVY !"


A poet, Andrew Duncan, has also used the word in a poem reflecting on the sea routes and influences 'flowing into' the coastal town of Aberystwyth from points west. In a commentary he has this to say about the word: 
"On the beach at Aberystwyth, I picked up a piece of rock which had a myriad of tiny tunnels piercing it. Like surf, a lot of it was made of air. I guessed this was fossilised cold-water coral. My niece, aged about nine, informed me that they had been to a Welsh museum which had such a piece of rock and it was called “babalwbi”. (I now think the pebble may be a piece of basalt, but the coral identification is an object which is valid inside the poem. The tunnels may be air-bubbles in a boiling flow of lava.) I liked the word because it was decentralised. (Babalwbi now appears on the Internet and seems to mean lumps of white quartz. OK! The research went wrong!) In the poem, the pebble symbolises multiple routes and connections going to and fro without a centre. It is "surf"."

So now we have it: limestone, coral, basalt, quartz (that reference the poet found was mine again!) The meaning of babalwbi depends on where you are, and who you are. For the stone waller it's a very heavy rock, for the poet it signifies connections, for the local historian it's an interesting tradition that speaks of home, and for me it's just another blip in the wall (which has needed some rebuilding of late.)