'Babalwbi' - or not?

Image: © Natasha Ceridwen de Chroustchoff Taken: 25 Mar 2008

These ornamental stone clumps, (usually of white quartz), are often to be seen on gateposts or along walls outside dwellings in West Wales. Apparently they are known by the charming name of babalwbi/babaloobi. In the absence of street lights they may help the chapel-(or pub-)goer to find the way home on dark nights. I don't know where I came across the name but it is confirmed here http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordf718.html?id=6132 (line 8) and the writer provides this explanation '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.)' Update. The name has been confirmed by blogger 'Welsh Waller' although he asserts that the material concerned is limestone. he writes: "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 be 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!" Original post can be found here https://welshwaller.wordpress.com/about/

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0