Few places in Wales catch the creative imagination as Enlli does. T Gwynn Jones gazed across at an island where twenty thousand saints lay and Dilys Cadwaladr, the first woman to win the Crown at the National Eisteddfod, taught at the school in the 1940s. The murals at Carreg bear witness to artist Brenda Chamberlain’s most productive years. More recently, Kim Atkinson, Christine Evans, Ben Porter and others have expressed their own relationship to the island in their individual ways, along with many artists in residence and onlookers-from-afar; and occasional enthusiastic daytrippers like myself.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of Llio Rhydderch’s Enlli, an album of triple harp music that is one of the unsung masterpieces of Welsh music in this century. Llio is an interpreter who can turn sound into landscape, releasing the layers hidden within a place – wildlife, community, geology, spirituality, legend. As we chatted about the album recently, she quoted a line from ‘Yr Eglwys’ (‘The Church’), a poem by Gwenallt:

Pan deneuo’r Ysbryd y cynfas gwelwn mai creadigaeth yw’r bydysawd. (When the Spirit stretches the canvas thin, we see that the universe is a creation.)

For me, Enlli has always been a place where that canvas is stretched thin; where faith and disbelief, memory and myth, play hide- and-seek. I can lay claim to having lived here, but without recollection of that time. As a writer, it has become part of my identity not by choice but through the interest of others. New stories grow from those half-told.

In the returning there is unease, and then joy, and then unease again. Perhaps everyone feels a tinge of that unease; perhaps that is why so many have tried to pin their Enlli down on paper, on canvas, on tape. A place almost too good to be true, too true to be good, its beyondness at odds with all else in our world.