In all the years since, I’ve never regretted what we did. No one was talking about restitution of artifacts in those days – I don’t think anyone would even have thought about it, not among curators anyway. It wasn’t something I thought about either – I can’t claim to have been ahead of my time, because I didn’t do it of my own accord. I needed a good deal of prompting, and that prompting just came in a particularly strange form. It all began the day I first caught sight of the sieidi, although if I’m honest I had no idea what it was. I had just started working at the National Museum a few weeks earlier, and I was still mostly confined to the basement and the storage areas – the senior curators wouldn’t let me near the actual exhibitions yet.

Read on.