Rekindling the fire

Another attempt to resuscitate a dead or dying craft - and for what? Your heart sinks in anticipation of the scene as you cross the quiet roads of north Mayo, turn left in Crossmolina and head out the lyrically-named Laherdaun road. A sooty old shed, maybe; a brawny, bewildered old smith and a few gormless, sweaty Americans trying to hammer a shape into a battered old horse shoe. And then there's me - expected, no doubt, to shock my poor, dead arm-muscles into doing a bit of heavy hammering myself.

Lord. Well, rewind that reel. The smith turns out to be a German artist - brawny, to be sure. Also with a handsome, rugged visage, an intriguing aside in memories of subversive German theatre in the 1960s and a passion for smithing to thaw the most unlikely souls. Gerald Muller, in short, is one of Crossmolina's more interesting tourist attractions.

On the shores of Lough Conn, in the grounds of beautiful Enniscoe House - the last great house of north Mayo, and an offshoot of the Mayo North Heritage Centre - even being in earshot of the Muller forge is an exercise in nostalgia. Ah yes. Don't you find that hammer ringing on anvil resonates with the cry of the corncrake, long, leisurely walks to school through empty roads and liquid refreshment from the roadside water pump?

Forget it. Gerald Muller isn't giving up his farming, painting and sculpting to indulge you in your reveries of bygone days. No time for sentiment in this enterprise. Get in there, get on that leather apron, take up your rod of iron and get hammering.

And before you reach for that horse shoe, remember that blacksmithing was going for about 3,000 years before farriers were even dreamt of. The mother of all trades is how Muller describes it. "They made every single tool for every single trade - and that was only 150 years ago." And as the last few traditional blacksmiths around Ireland literally die away (he reckons only about three are still working), he sees a genuine, practical need to hold on to that hard-earned skill and knowledge. As a surprisingly young troupe of would-be smiths, male and female, moves to and fro from the coke fire to the anvils, choosing carefully from a dozen different hammers of awesome weight and size, artfully twirling the yellow-hot ear of a tiny iron ram or the handle of a firedog, Muller talks passionately about the need to foster the skills to conserve and repair the old iron riches that we already have but also - and just as importantly - to fashion a new, iron art for our times.

"This new architecture, sometimes is not what it should be. There is a pretending business, things that are pretending to be wrought iron. We are important to spread the knowledge about it - what it really is - and create new stuff which is of our time."

Only 18 months in action, and of his 75 students, already five have gone on to set up their own forges. William Michael from nearby Ballina is one of them. A qualified welder already, he has clearly developed a Muller-like feel for the artistry of smithing. "When you're welding, you're working with machines. Here, you're working with material." William, I notice, is an elegant young man of fairly normal size. No bulging biceps or straining neck veins. Then again, neither are these evident in the two young women hammering away this morning - Vivian Lynn, a heritage studies student, and Sharon Horkan.

Sharon is a FAS supervisor who did the smithing course last year and drops back regularly to live again that sense of achievement she found at the forge. Yes, the weight of the four-pound hammer was daunting to begin with, and yes, "your arm is a bit sore and your hand sightly swollen, but when you take what's just a rod of iron and turn it into a poker or shovel, the satisfaction you get is absolutely wonderful".

This is a thoughtful business - even if it's just the straightforward poker. "You have to think where you want the bend, where to heat to make that bend, where you want the twirl. You have to think all the time you're doing it . . . There's an old forge on some land of ours and I can look at the old nails, hooks and tools and old carriage hinges and donkey shoes and I can see now that it's hand-made, that it's got a nice turn or is well-flattened . . ."

As in so many other areas, women have been written out of blacksmithing history. But they were there. An old man observing the six young women who participated in the first course smiled benignly and assured them that in case they thought they were making history, they weren't. He'd seen it all before - in wartime England, when women took over the ship-building and fire-welded chain links weighing 100 lb each, in roasting temperatures in open sheds, restoring their energies with bucketfuls of salt water. But even when women have been admitted into this history, says Gerald Muller wryly, it has been with a negative gloss. Legend holds it was a woman smith who fashioned the nails for Jesus's cross.

Mayo and the forge have a dual impact. American couples have been eager participants on the two-week course - so eager, in fact, that Gerald has had to chase them out in the evenings with a broom.

It's worth the trip - just to look, for a start. Last week, William was helping to fashion an iron cross in memory of two local men who perished in the blizzard of 1947. Young Derek Jackson might be creating a real iron candleabra. A few footsteps away, a swarm of hardworking women in the heritage centre is bent over desks and screens, painstakingly assembling research data from a dozen different sources, helping to build the family-history database so vital to the hopes and dreams of people long exiled from an area nearly destroyed by emigration.

The heritage centre displays old machinery and household artefacts and reminders of how life was lived upstairs and downstairs in a different Ireland. And just a few farm-buildings away is the great house of the old landlords, now owned and managed as a welcoming country house by Susan Kellett, a direct descendant of the original settlers in the 1660s. Life here seems to have come the full circle.

For more detailson Gerald Muller's blacksmith courses, contact the Mayo North Family Heritage Centre, tel: 096-31809.