A dry-stone wall below Llanmoryd comes down once a year, and the farmers rebuild it without comment. The gap is a yard and a half wide. The stones lie in a fan downslope, and a trench of torn turf runs back up the hill to a hollow where a boulder has spent the winter. The boulder is a galeb duhr: granite the blue-gray of old slate, as big as a cart horse, and from November to March indistinguishable from the other rocks on the Moel Cadnant sheepwalk.
March. Meltwater loosens the slope and the galeb duhr loosens with it. Two citrine eyes open under a brow ridge crossed by a single vein of pink quartz, yellow as honey held to a window. A patch of moss lies on its crown, and orange lichen fills a split down its left flank. It rolls only downhill and only in the morning, when the ground is wet, pulling its thick arms in and its stubby legs under until it is a ball, and then it goes. A good roll is eighty paces. The wall is simply what is there at the bottom. Efa Prydderch, whose farm sits under the slope, measures each roll by the trench and moves her ewes off any trench still dark with fresh soil.
June. The ground hardens and the galeb duhr stops rolling. It sits on the ridge and feeds, pressing both hands flat into the scree until the gravel turns gray and dry as ash, which is what happens when the iron is drawn out of it. The bare circle it leaves is the width of a threshing floor, and heather will not take there for two years. Lambs shelter against its warm flank in the afternoon and it lets them. Nobody on the sheepwalk says the word quarry, and nobody carries a hammer above the wall. Efa says iron ringing on stone sounds to it like talk, and that it answers. She also says this one is older than the chapel at Llanmoryd. I have no means of testing that.
October. Rain returns and the galeb duhr is slower to lift its arms. It walks back up its own trench, grinding like a barrow of gravel, and settles into the hollow. By the first frost the citrine in its eyes has dulled to the color of creek pebbles and the moss on its crown has gone brown. It does not close its eyes. It simply stops moving them. The wall is rebuilt in April, after the roll, never before. The slope holds a dozen other walls, some closer, some newer. Why it always chooses this one is a question nobody has answered.
- Classification
- Earth elemental, boulder-bodied
- Habitat
- Hill slopes, scree and heather
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- the size of a cart horse
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Hill and scree country
- Binomial
- Petrosaltus rotundans
- Diet
- Iron-bearing gravel and clay
- Temperament
- Sullen, stubborn, slow to anger