This summer, I returned to Ynys Enlli for the third time. Stepping down from the blazing yellow boat onto Cafn’s pebble beach, I squinted against the sun and felt a sting across my cheeks, my skin tight from sea spray. I was attempting an escape. Just two weeks after submitting my final university assignment I had fled the cold, stress-imbued room of my Manchester student house and travelled west, drawn back by memories of previous summers spent on the island drenched in unhurried sunlight. To be returning alone this time was slightly daunting, especially for an entire month. Excited, I set off up the gravel track towards Beudy Plas.

I earned my keep as a volunteer, working with the wardens to take care of the island as it took care of us. I twisted wire mesh over rusted holes in the gabions, fortifying the harbour against future storms. I scraped peeling paint from weather-worn barn doors and applied sticky fresh coats of blue and white. An afternoon spent clearing a tangle of stinging nettles, lemon verbena, and goosegrass outside Lloft Carreg was rewarded with the discovery of a handful of soft orange-brown smooth newts, tucked away among the cobblestones. I helped cut back bracken, check the water tanks, pull weeds in the withies, clear snails from the polytunnel (my success rate always surpassed by that of the wardens’ two year old daughter), tidy the shop, and sweep the chapel. Once when the weather was right, zipped head to toe in white canvas, I had the joy of visiting the beehive. Pulling back the lid, I was engulfed in the dense smell of honey, all the island’s pollen coalescing. Then the arrival of Saturday would draw each week to a close, setting in motion the well rehearsed routine of changeovers, when stray sand was swept rapidly from bedroom floors and vases were filled with fresh handfuls of flowers, awaiting the arrival of the next week’s guests.

I have to admit, I didn’t finish the ambitious stack of books I’d packed in anticipation of long lonely evenings. I was swept up in a life lived in pace with the tides. Swimming in bays and tidal pools with the wardens, I learned the names of seaweeds and how to recognise them by shape, colour, or the iridescent glint as they swayed in the currents. Carol, the resident artist, drew me into her cacophonous workshop of colour and texture, desks laden with wool, iron, shells, ochre, and clay. On clear evenings I would walk south towards the sea of pink thrift filling the fields beyond the lighthouse, the whole island aglow in the evening light and reverberating with the clamouring sounds of waves, wind, seals, swallows, stonechats, gulls, and oystercatchers. When the mist rolled in I climbed up through the gorse to the top of Mynydd Enlli, hoping I might emerge into the blue sky. While I had no luck chasing a cloud inversion, my month on the island did coincide with two celestial extremes: the summer solstice and a major lunar standstill. Just before dawn and dusk respectively, we gathered with our binoculars and sat in wait, a small crowd of islanders looking east, murmuring quietly, waiting for a red glow to emerge above the horizon.

On my last night, I donned a headtorch and set out at midnight in search of Manx shearwaters. I joined a few people from the bird observatory and we walked northwards beneath a cloudless night sky. Against the flat open ground of Bae Nant, the manxies’ small black and white bodies could be easily spotted coming in to land. They waddled clumsily along the tops of grassy walls to their burrows, better adapted to moving through the air or sea, and with a little practice it was possible to reach down and scoop them up in your hands. We checked their legs for rings, continuing a population monitoring programme which has been running on the island since 1953. Manxies are migratory birds, flying over 6,000 miles each autumn to the coastal waters of South America, returning to Ynys Enlli in spring year after year. Waving goodbye from the boat in Cafn the next morning, I suspected that come next summer I too would feel an instinctive pull back to the island, a migratory itch, one that I would struggle to resist.

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