She is old.

Very old.

At more than a hundred years of age, the Ancient Woman has watched generations come and go upon the island.

Few people know much about her life. Fewer still could say when she made the abandoned lighthouse at the end of the western pier her home.

To some she is simply the old woman who lives beyond the town.

To the children of Lankytown, she is something altogether more interesting.

Because the Ancient Woman remembers things.

The Ancient Woman owns very little.

Inside the lighthouse are things found, things given and things that have simply remained with her while the years passed by.

An old photograph.

A forgotten possession.

Something washed ashore.

An object that once belonged to somebody whose name is barely remembered.

To anyone else, they might look like little more than the accumulated clutter of a very long life.

To the Ancient Woman, each can hold a memory.

And sometimes, a story.

Some of her stories were told to her.

Others happened within her lifetime.

She remembers people who have long since disappeared from Lankytown. Places before they changed. Events that survive now only as rumours and half-remembered tales.

Her version does not always agree with the version everybody else remembers.

Perhaps they are wrong.

Perhaps she is.

After more than a century, even memories can become stories.

There is one story she has never forgotten.

More than a century ago, the Ancient Woman was a six-year-old girl living in Lankytown.

Another child lived there too.

His name was Willie.

She remembers him.

And she remembers the terrible events surrounding his death.

She was there.

More than a century has passed.

The little girl grew old.

Lankytown changed around her.

And now, at the end of the western pier, an Ancient Woman sits within an abandoned lighthouse looking back towards the town she has known for almost an entire lifetime.

When the children come to visit, she tells them what she can.

Some stories make them laugh.

Some frighten them.

Some are difficult to believe.

And some have waited a very long time to be told.