Alice glimpsed what were clearly nuns, as she drove off the boat: seven or eight of them, dressed in long green habits, topped by tartan headscarves. They processed in their comedic puffin way, up the same ramp as the cars, into the drizzle. She laughed. She wouldn’t mind a green habit like that, and a headscarf. She had been taught by nuns as a girl, jolly ones, with toffees up their sleeves; it seemed that you never lost it, the impression of female sexlessness as a virtue. She shuddered as she passed them, wondering briefly where they were off to, before accelerating up the hill.

There was a sign at the first junction: smartly painted by hand in black and red, advertising that same museum café. Since it actually seemed to give off the aroma of city-strength coffee – you could smell the crunch of beans, see the swirl of milk, feel your ensuing caffeine throb – Alice parked, and grabbed her bag, and went inside.

JUDGE: In paragraph 14 you state—

ALICE: Oh yes, my female epiphany. [Sighs]

Because of her tiredness, and the coffee, and the rain, she was unprepared for being picked up, and shaken, and set down again, by the things she read. But so it was. Beyond the café, in the museum’s light-filled atrium overlooking the harbour, was a display called ‘Island Women’. There were biographical vitrines containing black-and-white photos, articles of clothing and trade, recordings of voices: speech and song. But the part which grabbed her attention – fingers to the throat – was older than all that. Some other age entirely.

Eva made sure that all the women of the islands knew about passage graves (as they call them in England; in Scotland they are chambered cairns; in Wales, burial chambers; in Ireland, passage tombs). Nobody knows what Neolithic people called these exquisite corbelled-stone edifices, but they built them in their most sacred places across the British Isles, most often on islands. The ones Eva liked are dramatic structures: grassy mounds, with an overlay of turf to keep out the rain, and an entrance passage so long and low it forces you to crawl on your hands and knees; until you reach a large central chamber, where, at certain times of year, the solstice for example, or the equinox, the sun penetrates in a shaft of golden light.

Almost always the signboards outside these places – nicely produced, to withstand all weathers – describe them as burial chambers; acoustic sound-rooms for the transmission of chanting at lower resonances; ritual spaces for Druid-like high priests. Pictorial reconstructions might show young, usually old, white men with short, usually long, beards. But the display in the Lerston Museum makes other claims. It asserts that these womb-shaped sacred spaces, complete with birth passage and fallopian-tube side chambers, are architectural representations of the female body, built to accommodate not just annual solar celebrations, but year-round female rites of passage, such as menstruation and birth.