Free The Fish Ladder by Katharine Norbury Page A

symbols, or the sign of the cross – the round grey rocks on the short green grass encouraging a game as aimless yet seemingly addictive as the idle rearrangement of fridge magnets.
    Each summer our family come to the headland for a picnic, and Evie and her cousins use the almost perfect rectangle for a slightly too large wicket, the natural ha-ha created by the grassed-over walls serving as their boundary. At the edges of the green apron, where the land meets the sea, there are cliffs, striated with red jasper and capped with a yellowish, ochre-coloured crystal, peculiar to this place. The children know to stay well back from the drops. There are no beaches in the immediate vicinity, and on clear days the children perch within the safety of the crags and watch the shifting currents below. Often they see seals. Sometimes they see fishermen checking lobster pots at the base of the cliff. And, almost always, they see the island, Ynys Enlli.
    We have never been to the island although we’ve looked at it often. All we know of it is the fin of its mountain, the huddled ruins of its abbey. On rough days we have watched the waves break white as sail sheets against an inchoate shore. On clear days we have seen the sun fall full over its back, bleaching it pale as sea-glass. Once, when the haze was slight, we saw Jules Verne’s green ray, were surprised by it, as a last curve of coloured light became visible in the sea air. It flared, acidic lime, almost fluorescent, for the smallest moment, before the sun dropped into the sea, leaving an unlikely crème de menthe afterglow.
    A tree grows on the island – an extraordinary tree – seeded, it is said, from the pip of Merlin’s apple. The apple that he discarded as he turned away from a wicked enchantress; growing hard, his power drawn from him, he was turned to stone by her, and only his bones remained. The bones are said to lie inside a cave and a child could reach for them, could feel for Merlin’s bones, if only they knew where to look.
    In our garden, pushed into the hedge, there is another tree, although it’s more like a bush, being round like a spider’s nest with no obvious trunk, just spindles of leaf-covered wands which in late summer are studded with lemony, pink-striped fruit. Our tree was propagated by a local horticulturist from this one twisted parent, the oldest apple in Europe, the oldest apple in the world, which has evolved beyond recognition into a clattering wooden net, as vigorous as a vine, braced against the thin soil and burnt salt winds of the island. Twenty thousand saints are buried alongside Merlin, and possibly also King Arthur, for Geoffrey of Monmouth maintained that it was Avalon, after afal lon , meaning lane of apples in Welsh.
    But our business was not with the saints, or with the apples, or with the king and the wizard and his bones. We had come to the headland, to Anelog, and we were searching for St Mary’s Well.
    When Evie and I arrived we found everything enclosed, improbably, given the June day, in mist. The road was discernible, although only just, and when it ran to grass I stopped the car. There was nothing to see – no hill, no apron of land, no island. Cool and white, we inhabited a cloud; it was a curiously muted world. We left the car and began to walk in the direction of the cliffs. Our eyelashes and hair filled with beads of moisture that ran down our faces like tears, both delighting, and frightening, Evie. She was sure that a space had opened in the mist around us, and that this space was following us, which unnerved her. I tried to explain the idea of visibility, the idea of cloud density, and that we were able to see a little way ahead, and also a little way behind, but she could not comprehend it. Why were we able to see where we were going but not where we had come from?
    ‘How do you know where we are?’ she asked.
    At first we had followed a drystone wall but after a while that came to an end. I heard the muffled