I’d never been inside a lighthouse before. I’d expected floor-levels, an enclosed staircase. The Longing, however, was a grim, granite cone. A rickety staircase was pinned loosely against the wall, spiralling Hitchcock-style to the lantern room at the very top. The place reeked of damp and rotting fish. I wondered why we were standing in an inch of black liquid, until Isla explained that one of the lower windows was broken, and seawater had poured inside and pooled on the floor.

‘I gather you’ll need something to pump it out before you start,’ she said.

‘Mr Roberts is turning it into a writing studio, is that right?’ I asked, and Isla nodded.

‘He’s not published,’ she added. ‘Just a hobby. I wouldn’t be expecting him to produce The Iliad or anything like that. He bought it last year and didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Next thing I know, he’s asking me about getting a painter in to prettify it, make it into a writing studio.’ She gave a shrill laugh. ‘Whoever heard of such a thing? Surely all you need to write is a pen and paper.’

‘Maybe the views will inspire him,’ I offered.

‘Aye. Inspire him to go off sailing, more like.’

We were shrouded in darkness. Clover was clutching on to her toy giraffe, whimpering to go home. Bats flitted overhead. Moonlight dribbled from the small upper windows, revealing the height of the place.

‘It’s a hundred and forty-nine feet tall,’ Isla said, swinging her torchlight to the very top. ‘A hundred and thirty-eight steps to the lantern room. Braw views up there. I can show you when it’s light.’ Her torchlight rested on patches of paint that had crumbled off, revealing raw stone. About halfway up someone had graffitied a section of the wall in garish shades of lime-green and black.

‘There was a break-in,’ Isla said darkly. ‘Outsiders, you see. We get them here a lot more now, since the rental properties on the east side opened up. And the Neolithic museum, that’s new. You should take your girls.’

Isla reassured us that break-ins like this were rare, that tourists – or ‘outsiders’ – didn’t frequent the place often. Lòn Haven’s population was predominantly grassroots, with sixty or so archaeologists from ‘the University’ working at the Neolithic sites. Some of the younger population had inherited crofts that they didn’t want to live in, so they’d started renting them out. The older population objected strongly both to the younger islanders moving away (‘all of them want to live in Edinburgh or London,’ she told us with a sneer) and, as a result, drawing ‘outsiders’ to the island to rent out the crofts.