Free The Fish Ladder by Katharine Norbury

continued upstream. Partly because of the thick vegetation, and partly because of the marshy nature of the riverbed, there was no obvious way along the bank. Keeping the stream to the right, we followed it at a discreet distance, clambering to the top of the gulley, which formed a V-shaped cut in the land. On our side of the stream was a links golf course. Fields fringed the opposite bank. But the path across the golf course veered away from the water and into a sunken footway, a path from a time long before there was a golf course – a green lane, a holloway – spun around with gorse and blackthorn so that it formed a prickly tunnel adjacent to the stream. When we reached the end of the green lane the water was over to our right. At the edge of the golf course was a barbed-wire fence. We turned and went back to the footbridge and tried following the stream on its western bank. The western path went through a farmyard, towards the village of Edern, and again it bent away from the water, which now seemed to form a boundary to the farm, and was fenced in with barbed wire on both its banks. The houses of the village clumped ahead of us. I had read somewhere that Edern was the last village in Britain where fairies were seen. An old lady had apparently left a cake out for them, each week on baking day. She had done this until the 1950s. I started to tell Evie about it.
    ‘Mummy?’
    ‘Yes?’ Evie was tired, her face smooth, pale despite the sun, the usual animation of her features still, folded away like birds’ wings. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s go back.’
    We retraced our steps, and broke out the remains of the choc­olate, and resolved to try again. We would pick up the stream a bit closer to its source, somewhere on the shoulder of Garn Fadryn. But not today.
     
    As the summer unfolded, this became something of a pattern. We would pick up a river along the coast of the Llŷn and follow it as far as we could. But there was always a fence, or a field, or someone’s garden, private land, or a bull: something that could not be easily got around. Several of the rivers were enclosed, like this one, with barbed wire along both banks, so that the riverbed was the only pathway. In other places the fence might cross the stream itself. As the land rose higher water skipped through gullies, boun­cing and slipping over rocks and stones, between banks that grew ever more deeply ferned. Occasionally we came across oases of vegetation, watercress and duckweed, nourished to frenzy by the fertilisers that washed off the land. The streambeds were difficult to ascend safely or with comfort. The enclosure of the land was constant, and uniform, and it forced us to go back, or around. It seemed impossible to trace a watercourse without wire-cutters and secateurs.
    ‘What are they frightened o f ?’ Evie asked, and I had no answer for her.
     
     
    Notes on Afon Geirch

 
     
     
     
     
     

Ffynnon Fawr
    At its western tip the Llŷn Peninsula is like a pointing hand; a solitary finger gesticulates a warning against the Irish Sea, at the place where the tides converge, and this place is known as the Swnd, or Sound. Sometimes the sea is calm, but when the tides turn the slabs of water heave alongside one another to create whirlpools and vortices, currents that are legendary. A hill crouches on the south side of the headland, cloaked by heather and stubby gorse that forms a pretty, but prickly, mantle. Below the hill, running to the edge of the land, is an apron of baize-like grass and this flourishes, protected from the worst of the weather, kept short and neat by sheep. In the centre of the green-baize apron is all that remains of St Mary’s Church, now a rectangle of four low banks with a half-moon on one of the shorter walls, a ghost of the semicircular apse, although the whole thing has long since, centuries ago, grassed over. Occasional loose stones spill through the banks and people use them to write their names, or make