Wide enough, and off the heart

The hardest part of a crwth can be finding the wood for it. You need a piece of sycamore wide enough to take the whole body in one, and quartered right, and taken away from the centre of the tree — the heart moves and splits, and you want none of it in an instrument that has to last. So I stand a board up to the light and read it before a tool ever touches it: the run of the grain, the figure waking under the surface, where it will want to move and where it will hold. Most of this came out of the woodland within a walk of the bench. You come to hear a timber before you work it.