DIANA RETURNS HOME TO ISLAND GRAVE SITE.

Byline: Alan Cowell The New York Times

In the end, she came home to rest on a leafy island in a small and sculptured lake, behind the wrought-iron gates and weathered stone walls of her family seat well north of London, a final haven of privacy and exclusion as remote as could be imagined from the laser-glare of publicity that Diana, Princess of Wales, both shunned and courted.

From the ceremonies of Westminster Abbey to the Althorp Park estate of the Spencer family near the village of Great Brington, the coffin bearing Diana made its final journey by road along the M1 highway, whose northbound lanes were closed to normal traffic.

After the pomp of Westminster that drew the eyes and tears of the world, her return to the village and home where Diana grew up as Diana Spencer was intended by her family to be as exclusively private as her coffin's procession on a gun carriage through central London had been public.

The public was excluded from the burial at Althorp. The authorities ordered an air-exclusion zone over the estate to prevent photographers and television crews from filming the area. The roads leading to the village of Great Brington were sealed off to all except residents and police on Friday and are not to reopen until 6 a.m. Monday.

Only close family members were to attend the final burial on the small, green island in a lake known as the Oval, surrounded by groves of trees planted by royalty and nobility over the decades since the 5th Earl Spencer, then Lord of the Admiralty, restored what is called the Pleasure Garden area around the artificial lake in the 1880s.

Initially, Diana was to have been buried in the honey-colored 13th-century church of St. Mary the Virgin in Great Brington, where a family crypt contains the remains of 20 generations of Spencers, laid to rest there since the family acquired the estate in 1508. The imposing house at Althorp Park was built in 1573, and, these days, is open to the public in summer months for an entrance fee of roughly $10.

But the prospect of her grave being so accessible to the public in the parish church raised fears not only among the 200 villagers of Great Brington but also among Diana's family that it could become, as British commentators have pointed out, another shrine, like Elvis Presley's Graceland.

Indeed, up until Diana's death, Great Brington's greatest draw for U.S. visitors was the grave there of Lawrence Washington, the great-great-great-grandfather of George Washington, buried in the village in 1616.

In a statement Friday, the 9th Earl Spencer, Diana's younger brother, who has accused the tabloid press of hounding his sister to her death, said the move to the small island at The Oval had been decided on so that her grave could be ``properly looked after by her family and visited in private by her sons.''

At the same time, though, he said the grounds would be open to the public for several weeks a year so ``the general public may pay their respects.'' Moreover, he said, the family was considering a permanent memorial outside the grounds for people to pay their respects.

The move from the family crypt to the island brought audible relief to residents of Great Brington, which apart from a post office and a pub has no other stores, no parking spaces, no public toilets and no apparent wish to become a British Graceland.

``The village could not have coped with so many visitors,'' Roy Saunders, a parish official, told reporters Friday.

Against that, though, some questioned the move, arguing that Diana had become - as Prime Minister Tony Blair put it - a people's princess and that she would not have approved the denial of public access to her grave for much of the year.

``In death, the English return to their roots,'' Simon Jenkins wrote in The Times Saturday. ``The English go home. They seek out their ancestral acre and bury themselves in the earth on which their forefathers walked.

``Diana was a famous person who welcomed public affection. For her family to claim her back, as if for their own, seems a harsh response to this affection.''

Others, though, saw the decision to bury her on the small island as curiously appropriate.

``In life, her loneliness and vulnerability made her seem so often like an island surrounded by the hostile waters of royal rejection,'' said a report in The Independent newspaper.

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