The culmination of the trip was always to the chambered cairn: the grassy mound, aligned with the rising winter solstice sun. It had been sealed closed during the Neolithic, broken into at several points during medieval times, and then abandoned completely until Robert B. Turnbull, the Oxford archaeologist, reopened it again in 1933. He led two summers of excavations with a team of students. Eva, talking fast now – about how Turnbull, like the others, had misunderstood almost everything about this site, there are really interesting Neolithic carvings which he interpreted as arrowheads but which are clearly vulvas; he became obsessed by the medieval depositions, a dagger and rare leather gospel book, even though the pre-Christian female spirituality was far more ancient and important – would push open the stone door. It still turned perfectly on its Neolithic pivot. Eva would crawl in, urging her guest to follow. There was no light; she carried no torch. The guest would crawl after her along the tunnel into the darkness of the central chamber. There, Eva would seize her friend’s hands and move them to the huge stones of the back wall, to feel the V-shape carvings—

JUDGE: You dispute the submission made in the joint witness statement by Henry and George Harcourt-Vane, Eva’s elder two sons, that she was coerced into leaving the island of Cwen to the Foundation?

ALICE: Cwen was always part of her plan. She said so herself. You can see this is true from what happened with the short-lived women’s commune on the island of Skellar.

During the archipelago’s long history, only three or four of its thirteen islands have ever been privately owned. One of these is Cwen. Another, originally called Skellar, and of similar size, changed hands around the time that Eva began teaching literature at the All Islands’ College. Barely three miles long, with only two houses, and at the time, no shops or ferry connection, Skellar had been for some decades in the possession of an absentee owner. Some said he (always a ‘he’) was from Denmark, others that he lived in London. One fine June day, new owners came over on the boat, their possessions bound up behind them in an array of trunks, suitcases and boxes. The ferryman, Fred, told Eva that evening, when she met him on the pier, that the ladies in question had insisted that he could bring things to the island, on his boat, but never set foot there himself. They had come to the archipelago, you see, because of its ancient female sacred history.

‘Its what?’ said Eva.

TARA: She knew nothing!