THERE is barely a murmur of wind. The surface of the lake is restful and smooth. At the edge of the water stands Linda Cooper, a 54-year-old insurance worker from Essex, gazing at the island in the lake's centre. There, in an unruly tangle of trees and undergrowth, is the grave of Diana, Princess of Wales.
"They murdered her," says Cooper, a small tremble in her voice. "She was a threat to the establishment and there are people in this country who will do anything to protect the class system. The Royal Family tried to destroy her but in the end they ca
n't. She's immortalised here in her young form forever. No one can take that away from her."
On the island is a small column topped with a Grecian urn, the classical symbol of remembrance. But Diana's pilgrims do not come here to mourn in the usual sense of the word. For Cooper and other visitors to the Spencer family's Althorp estate in Northamptonshire, the Princess is not someone distant, untouchable and dead. Ten years after her fatal car crash in Paris, Diana is for them a living presence. They talk about her in present tense.
"I'm the same star sign as her - Cancer - and I think I understand her vulnerability and her power," says Cooper, a small, tidily dressed woman who wears her blonde hair in a neat bob. "I know her moods and her ways, her ups and downs. I feel peaceful here with her. It's a lovely place for her to rest."
Not everyone is in thrall to the princess's charms. Earlier this month, Germaine Greer, the Australian feminist and academic, used an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to brand Diana "a devious moron" who came to "a sticky end". Greer condemned her affairs with married men such as the antiques dealer Oliver Hoare, whom Diana bombarded with 300 nuisance calls when their relationship foundered. "And this is the angel that people want to crown," sneered Greer.
Reaction to her rant revealed two very different popular views of Diana a decade after her death on August 31, 1997. For some, the latter part of her life - feted by dress designers and playboys - and her posthumous veneration are symbols of all that is fatuous about contemporary culture. They resent the way celebrity has replaced worth as the measure of an individual's standing in the eyes of much of the world, and they see the cult of Diana as a symptom of a society where it is more important to emote than to think.
Yet for others Diana is little short of a modern saint, an icon in every sense. She is adored for her beauty and style as much as for her good works with the poor, HIV sufferers and women with eating disorders. When one glossy magazine carried a picture of her campaigning against land mines in Angola early in 1997, dressed in a protective vest and visor, it also noted that her beige trousers were Armani and her chic top was Ralph Lauren. Saving the world was good; saving the world in perfect hair was fabulous.
So who is Diana to us now? A vain, manipulative clothes-horse or the People's Princess? And what do Althorp and its endless stream of visitors - the pilgrims and the simply curious - tell us about her reputation a decade after her death?
Althorp is every American tourist's idea of the perfect English stately home, an 18th century Henry Holland house in honey- coloured sandstone set in 15,000 acres of lush Northamptonshire farmland dotted with prosperous villages.
The estate does not release visitor figures, but on the day I dropped by last week there were 13 coach parties in the first two hours of opening, and by lunchtime there were almost 200 cars in the car park. Entry is £12.50 a head - £15.00 if you want access to the inner sanctums on the first floor of the house where some of the more intimate family rooms can be found, and where it is easier to imagine Diana playing as a young girl.
In his introduction to the Althorp guidebook, the current earl, Diana's brother Charles, heaps praise on the generations of Spencer women who have lived here. "Some have been considered highly fashionable; others deeply charitable; and many have been rated beauties. An independence of spirit is detectable throughout the Spencer women. It would be true to say that an appreciation of what is important, and a dismissal of what is irrelevant, have also been evident. Diana was the embodiment of these diverse qualities. It is therefore appropriate that she has returned to Althorp, to rest in peace, in the most beautiful of settings, where she is most truly in context."
It was Charles Spencer who, in his emotive funeral oration, damned the Royals and the paparazzi and paid tribute to "the unique, the complex, the extraordinary and irreplaceable Diana". This is the woman that visitors to Althorp come looking for. So what do they find?
The focal point is the stable block, which has been turned into a permanent exhibition devoted to Diana's life and work. There are the old school reports - "history: fairly good". In a corner are the battered suitcases she used on her charitable travels, each with a red label that warns: "Fragile".
A projector plays old Spencer family home movies showing a gamine Diana practising dance steps barefoot on the Althorp lawn, an English rose in bud. The film deliberately jams on an image of her in mid-leap, frozen in time and possibility, and fades to black. Simple, but powerful, and not quite as cheesy as you might think.
But it is too much for one of the pilgrims, who is crying into a hanky. Outside, once she has gathered her composure, Pat Ward, 45, a waitress from Coventry, says it was not so much the film that set her off but the collection of Diana's clothes in the previous room - a ghostly arcade of faceless mannequins wearing expensive creations in silk and taffeta and satin and lace and velvet.
"It's because Diana actually wore those things that were right there in front of me," she explains. "She is such a stunning lady, so stylish, with such a lovely figure. And when you see the dresses it's just her."
In tow, she has her 12-year-old son Ashley. "I wanted to show Ashley a bit of history about someone who did a lot for this country. I feel a real connection with her, being a mum and being about the same age. Ashley's really enjoyed it." She gives her son a prod. "Yeah," he says with no discernible enthusiasm.
Explaining Diana's allure is not as easy as it might at first appear. Her beauty and her good works, even her early death, do not seem quite sufficient to account for the breadth and depth of her appeal.
Nettie Cowley has her own theory. These days she is retired and as she walks around the Althorp lake she does so slowly and with the aid of a stick. But she used to be matron at Rugby School, which gave her something of an insight into the British upper class.
"Stuck up," she says. "That's what they are, especially the Royals. Diana wasn't like that."
She waves her stick at the island where Diana's body lies. It does not meet with her favour. "It's too morbid - all overgrown and dark and wild looking," she says. "That's not what she was. She was bright and open. She helped people in poor countries far away and people with disease. She touched them and she wasn't afraid."
Touch. It is the word used again and again by the Althorp faithful. Diana's appeal is not just that she took a personal interest in the lives of people who faced extremes of poverty, war or disease. It is because her "reaching out" to them was more than just metaphorical.
Being a member of the Royal Family - quite literally, one of the untouchables - meant the simple gesture of a hand placed on a hand was invested with extraordinary power. When Diana touched the hand of a man who was HIV-positive it ended up on the front page of newspapers worldwide. She had a very simple way of assisting her chosen causes. All she had to do was listen to the people she was trying to help and empathise with their plight - and be photographed and filmed while she did it.
Time magazine, which this weekend has the princess once more on its cover, describes this as "the power of redemptive understanding". Or, as the lady herself put it in an interview: "Someone has got to go out there and love people and show it."
The impact of her death has come to be seen as a turning point in British social history, and up to a point this is true. The national outpouring of grief, and the Royal Family's initial refusal to respond to it, certainly changed the monarchy. The Queen came to realise her status as monarch was not an immutable fact of British life. It had to be earned. The monarchy's position required the tacit permission of the British people, and that permission could be withdrawn.
Whether Diana's death changed Britain itself is less certain. People did not change overnight from buttoned-up emotional cripples to blubbing, candle-waving, vigil-attending sentimentalists. Rather, her death made visible a change that had already taken place in British society over the previous decade, making it socially acceptable to be honest about what you felt. The funeral and the aftermath simply gave this an opportunity for expression. And Althorp continues to do so.
At the lakeside, five retired West Indian ladies sit on a bench and share a packed lunch, cackling and gossiping in Jamaican accents. Otherwise there is a preponderance of well-turned-out Englishwomen in their mid-forties, the age Diana would have been had she lived. Some visitors are pausing for a moment in front of the mock Greek temple built by the Spencer family at one end of the lake, which has the name "Diana" chiselled into its portico.
"You can see the family has tried to make a connection with the goddess Diana," muses Robert Walker, a 61-year-old local Northamptonshire man who is showing round a visiting friend from the Philippines. "Interesting, isn't it? Diana was the goddess of hunting. Yet she became the hunted, what with the paparazzi and everything."
A professional composer, Walker is the only person I speak to at Althorp who does not appear to be under Diana's spell. Althorp is not to his taste. "They are aiming for some kind of serene grandeur, but I don't think they pull it off. It looks too middle-class and tidy, like a municipal park.
"I'm not moved by it, but some people here clearly are. I suppose because of the decline of religion and spirituality people are clutching at things like this. It gives them something to grasp at."
Away from Althorp, would it be possible to find someone similarly immune to the princess's charm? A few hundred yards down the road from Althorp is Little Brington, a well-to-do village boasting a fine square-towered church and a coaching inn, the Fox and Hounds, that first started serving in 1620. At the bar are two local couples enjoying an afternoon pint. No, they would rather not talk about Diana. "We're sick of it," says the smaller of the women. "Every year at this time it's the same. Diana, Diana, Diana. We're sick of being asked what we think. We don't think anything."
Walking past the village post office is the tall and gangly figure of the local Church of England vicar. The Rev Chris Goble looks after six local parishes known together as the Spencer Benefice, because they surround the Althorp estate. The earl is the patron of the choir. Yes, says the vicar, there will be a special service in Little Brington church on August 31.
"We want to commemorate her death and what it meant for this community, putting it under the eyes of the world," he says. That experience, he admits, has been "a mixed blessing" for the village, providing jobs in the tourist industry but bringing unwanted attention to a corner of England that would prefer to be anonymous.
"It's a position we've learned to live with," he says. "But there's more to the history of this village and this community than just the memory of Diana. The church was here 500 years before the Spencers came to the estate. There's a long history which people are proud of and is perhaps overlooked. There are people here with memories of Diana, but they prefer to keep them private. We hold her memory in high esteem."
As the vicar says goodbye, yet another coachful of Diana devotees revs past on its way to Althorp. Most will leave with tasteful turquoise gift bags containing tasteful gifts from the Althorp shop - perhaps a tote bag adorned with pictures of English roses (£15) or a "hand-embroidered wedding shoe ornament" (£10).
The pilgrims will be coming to Althorp for many more decades yet, hoping to validate the personal connection they feel with Diana. They will come for the same reason fans of the King go to Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee. This Princess touched their lives, and they just can't help believing.
