There should be a light on the hill

On my adventures in the first few weeks of van-life in Hank Vanigan, I ended up on the old road from Cavan to Dublin, somewhere I spent a Lot of time travelling in my childhood. My mother kept her parents' tiny, crumbly, ancient two up two down terrace and we visited it every month and for long lazy weeks on the summer holidays. When I left home on Friday, for north Sligo, I had no idea I would be spending the week slowly driving coast to coast, across the country towards Dublin; stopping off in Enniskillen (the castle with the sycamore from my last post), the marina in friendly Belturbet and finally on to the charming Park Beo in Meath, just off the route that we used when I was young, before the motorway was built. I discovered it on the Park 4 Night app and went purely on the description, with only a vague notion of where it was, and followed satnav to get there.

I was quite moved by the drive. It recalled so many memories. The staged move to Sligo from Dublin in my late twenties, using Cavan as a temporary base as we searched for jobs and accommodation. Balancing on narrow marble, hunting ancient dates in my grandparents' graveyard. Sticky-carpet nightclubs in hotels I stumbled through as a teen. The old shopfront of Eats and Treats in the town of Kells, signage and shop long gone, but the 70s amber and brown mosaic tile framing still surviving.

And then I saw it, the mysterious tower of Lloyd, a seemingly misplaced lighthouse, on a high hill, lightless and solid against the purplish late evening light, delivering that little quickening of the breath, the skin prickle of meaning and memory and the last domino in the sense of this journey being no accident.

After I had settled at the Park on the new greenway I did a little fact finding on the Spire/Tower/inland lighthouse. I learned that it was built in the late 1700s by a member of the colonising British aristocracy. His great grandfather had come over with the map making project that divided up the land and distributed it to its new owners. It is a Doric column, something that was popular at the time - think Nelson's pillar - as a symbolic, commemorative, I-built-this! declaration on the landscape. From the top of its 100 ft height you can see 28 miles (45km) of horizon. Where a regular column might just have had a cap, this one was built with a lantern room, for viewing hunts, for surveying the land and likely, conscious or not, for asserting power.

When I saw it again I remembered how I loved it as a child, watching it from the back of the car as we travelled back and forth on the Cavan road. There was no Wikipedia at the time, so its meaning was up for grabs. I remembered wondering if I hadn't seen the light because it was on its backward swing as we drove past, trying to force myself to pay attention as it passed by on each leg of the journey. I remembered wondering if I would ever see a ghost-light, if it was some kind of decommissioned lighthouse. I remembered finding it odd that it existed in this place of ancient spiritually important hills, the Hill of Tara, the Hill of Uisneach. It felt simultaneously out of place and fitting... there should be a light on the hill, and yet, there isn't.

I realised in reading about its lantern room that I had been collapsing the lantern with the light and went off to do a bit of reading about the terminology of lighthouses, feeling a little naff for having selected and begun using the title and not knowing this fairly elementary thing about it. Actually though, the slow unravelling of the meaning seems to be part of the point of the name.

The image of the lantern room appeared on a shamanic journey on the 6th of June this year, 2026. The same day the door fell off the van on my first time out in it. The van's first outing came with a vision of a lantern room and a gut-punch lesson on depending on others. I woke up the morning after feeling energised by the title 'The Lighthouse', but realised as I wrote and thought about it, that it wasn't the lighthouse itself, with all of its connotations of writer as beacon or guide, but the lantern room, which was what I actually saw in the journey.

In it I saw a lantern room on top of a giant pyramid, and after a bit of faffing I climbed the steps and sat beside the light and looked out. You might be imagining now, some sweeping scene laid out before me, but there wasn't really a scene, it was more about the experience of sitting there.

I felt thrilled and grounded at the same time. It reminded me of looking out from the caves of Keash some years ago, or the magnificent God's Window viewing point in South Africa. I felt stabilised, supported by the earth through the massive tripod anchoring footprint of the pyramid, but at the same time, exhilarated by an almost too-much-to-take-in ultra-vista height, soaring into the sky. And alongside the excitement, I felt companionship, sitting there, beside this light source, it felt like we were together, looking out, accompanying each other. The light a presence without being a person. A neutral friendliness. Light always seems self-evidentially symbolic for whatever the driving force of life might be: the sun makes life. This light had that same quality of enjoying and offering vision and being present, observing and communicating, in its own simple way. It felt good to be let up there with it, in my little human form, allowed to take a seat in this powerful place, with this accepting, watchful presence.

I had been wrestling with the title of the letters for a while, using a placeholder name of 'Seeing Clearly'. It made a sort of sense as I took Lucent as my surname when I transitioned. It captured my love of all things translucent, allowing light through, the glow of the moon, the light coming through the new Beech leaves in the spring I spent wandering the forest trying to unburnt-out myself. So that Sunday morning I was playing with the Lighthouse, enjoying its natural fit with my porthole-like logo. But this isn't a coaching consultancy or a cult: I am not light, bequeathing my elevated, radiant knowledge to my readers. Lucent is about what is shining through, the ability of light to transmit through something... like my other great love, stained glass. It is an ongoing activity of light, not a static source.

The appeal of the lighthouse image that the journey had reminded me of was the feeling of being in a lighthouse, as I always imagined it as a child. We took our holidays in the Isle of Man and Jersey and all around the Irish Coast when I was little. Lighthouses and all manner of coastal visitor attractions delighted me and became permanently bonded to the feeling of freedom and fun of being away. Lighthouses in particular conjured a certain feeling state. To be right there, on the edge of the storm waves, shining a light into the darkness, the raw power of the ocean in turmoil, this tall, vulnerable tower, topped with glass. What was it like to stand up there and look out, standing next to that magically powerful light? I wrote this little piece to try to capture it:

Every light house has a lantern room. A shrine to light, to the wish to keep each other safe. Guiding, warning, a reminder of safe harbour and home. A sculpture of glass, a vapour, channelled to cut through storm and night's disorientation. That's where I want to be. A 360 vista, in a cage of glass, cozy against the winds. My eyes eating all the beauty, seeing all the seeing. Held and safe, anchored and soaring.

So it is the glass room itself that I am delighted by. The feeling of being held while experiencing the excitement, the fear, the awe. And that is what I write about here. The delight of being inside the snowglobe, inside the sheltering glass of a room on wheels, the coziness, the feeling of being accompanied by light and beauty that my life has gifted me. I enjoy sharing that with whoever wants to receive it.

The tower of Lloyd is an inversion of power. It's interesting that most of the tourist literature now refers to it as a spire. A spire is pure ornament; the rename politely erases the lantern room, the watching, from the story. Where the hills of Meath had hosted ancestral fires of connection to land and spirit, this lightless watchtower hoarded the magic for itself. My view, my land, my perspective. It harnessed the power of elevation and glass to centre its own gaze. Not to help anyone through storm, but worse, to dress itself as charity - the story told is that building it gave work to local labourers during a period of famine in Meath in the late 1700s. Starving people, building an eye in the sky. Visible for miles around to everyone forced to work their own land for someone else's profit. And later, an accidental gravestone: the mass grave of victims of the genocidal famine of the mid 1800s lies at its feet.

It's not my intention here to demonise the people who built it; they were mired in the culture of supremacy and control that defined their era. I understand all supremacy to be founded on fear, self-hatred and the life-denying grappling of power as the illusion of control, the ego building defences and edifices against the vulnerability of being alive. People aren't our enemy - fear, delusions of grandeur, the fantasies of control of the ego - these are our true enemies, and no one is excluded from the struggle.

But interestingly, that didn't stop it being magical to me as a child. My ancestors had succeeded in freeing their land, so I could look up at this beautiful creation and see it outside of its historical meaning and just feel the sadness of the absence of light.

It's taken me days to write this piece, so I've passed my weekly publishing goal. Nick is visiting this week, on his holidays and was patiently sipping coffee and attending to Kru's every petting whim yesterday morning while I researched and wrote. I stopped to read aloud a piece I had been giggling about (the Gentleman's Accessory, I'll tell you about it again) and told him some of this story, which led to us discovering that we could visit on Friday. So, we take our first overnight adventure in the van to move back towards Park Beo in readiness for a trip up Lloyd's tower! Time to test the new recording gear I think :)