There is something non-intuitive about the concept of a fish ladder, a mental clash between fins and tails, between feet and hands and rungs.
But fish ladders exist – Google will tell you all about them.
Fish ladders, often a series of low steps, are built around natural or artificial barriers in a river, such as weirs or dams, so that fish like salmon can leap upstream to spawn. They enable fish to beat the barriers and travel to their source.
It is early summer and Katharine Norbury has empty arms.
She had conceived a baby in the winter, but lost it in the spring.
“When summer came, and brought with it the realisation that our baby should have been with us, have been in my arms, warm and cuddly and smelling of sunshine, I found that I was struggling,” she writes.
But she cannot give in to grief – she has to be strong for her daughter Evie, who is nine.
So she comes up instead with a theme for the long summer holidays – following a river from the sea to its source.
And she soon discovers that she has, by chance, embarked on a journey to the source of life itself – “not an abstract journey, or a metaphorical one about who we are and what we’re doing here.
“A literal one: a journey to the source of this, particular, life.”
Norbury was adopted as a baby, and after losing her second child, began to dwell on her own beginnings, on where she had come from.
And so she begins a series of journeys, often along watercourses or bodies of water, sometimes with Evie and sometimes alone, one of which leads literally to her birth mother’s door.
But while this is an adoption story and a family story, it is also a nature story, because Norbury is a walker and a lover of the British countryside.
And she is a writer, not only exquisitely sensitive to the paths she is taking, the plants and the birds and swirling waters she finds on her way, but able to describe them for us, her readers.
* The Fish Ladder by Katherine Norbury is published by Bloomsbury