THESE days she lives a lonely, almost unnoticed life, curiously isolated from the glamour and society in which she once played a major part.

Even fellow islanders on tranquil Seil, in the Western Islands of Scotland, have got used to seeing Frances Shand Kydd as little more than a blur as she passes in her car.

The mother of Princess Diana is best known locally as a popular woman who suddenly became a recluse after the man for whom she sacrificed so much of her life, second husband Peter Shand Kydd, left her for another woman.

'She always seems to be preoccupied these days,' says a fellow islander, 'as though all her troubles are constantly being run and rerun through her mind.' They don't see much of her. Indeed, the cruel joke on the island, where crime is so low that people can normally leave the keys in their cars, is that the burglar who stole her jewellery while she was recently away in London giving evidence against Diana's former butler, Paul Burrell, was 'the first visitor she has had for ages'.

This week, she had a miraculous escape from serious injury when her car crashed into a stone bridge and skidded on its roof near Seil. She was trapped for several minutes in the overturned vehicle before being freed.

Two years ago, Mrs Shand Kydd, who was once banned for drink-driving, crashed into a ditch not far from the site of Wednesday's accident.

This time, she said it was wet and windy and she was trying to avoid an oil spill on the road. She was breathalysed at the roadside, but the result was negative.

The car, meanwhile, was a write-off.

Life has been hard for Frances Shand Kydd. She has been predeceased by two children, the infant John, who died aged 11 hours, and Princess Diana, killed aged 36 just over five years ago.

HAS been vilified as a 'bolter' abandoning her family for love - quite wrongly, incidentally, but more of that later - and now she is suffering from the Spencer name being trailed in the mud of the collapsed Burrell trial, and the family being portrayed as snobbish and vindictive.

She also has to live with the constantly open wound of Diana not speaking to her for the last four months of her life after a telephone row ended when the Princess slammed down the receiver.

It shows in her face, caught in the icy winds that blast the tiny garden of her two-bed whitewashed bungalow with its superb views of Seil Sound.

It can be felt in her hands, still retaining at 66 the languid elegance of a former Viscountess, but with the homely texture of an islander who lives entirely alone and has to fend for herself.

'She's very bruised by what happened at the trial,' says one long-time family friend. 'It's had a huge effect on her - she's very down.' But Frances Shand Kydd has not entirely lost the fighting spirit she displayed at the Old Bailey when she stumped into the witness box with the help of a walking stick and batted away any question she considered crass.

Nor, clearly, has she lost the sense of humour that attracted Viscount 'Johnny' Spencer and then, when life with the moody future Earl Spencer was at a low, the wallpaper heir Shand Kydd.

After Wednesday's crash she joked: 'I hit the bridge, but luckily there was no damage done - though I can't say the same for the car.' Above all, Frances Shand Kydd still lives with the jagged memory of the 2am telephone call from a friend picking up a newsflash of her youngest daughter's 1997 Paris car crash.

She still mourns that final row with her daughter - over her revealing details about Diana's childhood and bulimia in an interview - that can never be healed.

And she still believes that when Prince Charles went with her other daughters to collect Diana's body from Paris, she should also have been invited to go with them.

That she wasn't may have been a hangover years earlier from her decision to leave Johnny Spencer, after meeting the dashing former submariner Shand Kydd at a London party.

And the 'bolter' label - a term used mainly by the aristocracy - has never left her, even though, when she went to join Shand Kydd in London, her two elder daughters, Lady Sarah McCorquodale and Lady Jane Fellowes, were away at boarding school, and she took the two little ones, Diana and Charles (now the 9th Earl Spencer), with her.

It was when Diana and Charles returned to their father for Christmas that she lost them because he refused to let them return to their mother.

The divorce itself saw the Establishment ranged against her in what some feel was a gross parody of justice. Even her mother, Ruth, Lady Fermoy, a friend of the Queen Mother, was against her.

Most recently, the Burrell trial hit her almost as hard. That, and Burrell's acquittal after those private pre-trial assurances by the incompetent police that he was guilty.

For about a decade she has been a Catholic convert, and mostly in time of stress, as her friends and family know, it has been either that or the bottle that has helped her combat the many low points.

In recent years, Diana's death has given her a purpose that was not there before. She discovered that, like her daughter, she too could help others, and this gives her a feeling of closeness to Diana that was not there, to her abiding regret, in the months before the Paris underpass crash.

At a time when the Scottish fishing industry has been going through a hard time, she has used her 'celebrity' as Diana's mother in a way she would not have dreamed while Diana was alive, speaking out for it and becoming patron of the Mallaig and North West Fishermen's Association.

She is also involved in the Pilgrimage Trust which takes groups of disabled children to Lourdes.

Yet, rather like Diana in the final years of her own life, Frances Shand Kydd has found it hard to escape loneliness in the privacy of her own world.

As was the case with Diana, many, many days are spent entirely alone.

In Diana's will, made in 1993, six months after she and Prince Charles parted, she expressed the wish that Charles would consult her mother over the 'upbringing, education and welfare' of William and Harry.

Mrs Shand Kydd sees this responsibility as one of the most important parts of her life, but her input into the boys' upbringing has been small, although she was keen to see William choose a Scottish university, St Andrews.

Her two grandsons don't visit her on Seil, although she has been an overnight guest of Charles at Highgrove. When she travels south, it is usually to see her daughters and grandchildren, as well as her son, Lord Spencer, at Althorp.

How touching, therefore, and revealing also, that when Paul Burrell was still a Spencer family favourite but fearing he and his wife Marie could no longer afford to live in London after Diana's death, she offered up to pound sterling120,000 to help them buy a London home -- so long as there was a permanent room in it for her to use whenever she wished.

In the end, the Burrells decided to go north.

It was 14 years ago that Peter Shand Kydd left her for champagne expert Marie-Pierre Palmer after 19 years of marriage during which they first lived in Australia where he ran a sheep farm and then in an 18th-century Seil farmhouse set in 900 acres.

She was distraught. They had been a lively and popular couple on the island, and it was no secret that she yearned for him to come back to her, shedding many lonely tears, but not giving up hope.

That hope died, however, in 1991 when Peter and Marie-Pierre were married.

The loneliness that followed his departure has never left her. No other man has assumed any real importance in her private life.

The grandeur that once would have made her mistress of Althorp, and all its treasures, became instead a tiny, isolated bungalow with only one other islander's home in sight.

Frances has her memories and her regrets, but, crucially, she has her religion. 'She needs it for many reasons,' says a fellow Catholic in nearby Oban. 'But most of all she needs it because it gives her a feeling of not being alone any more.'