TradeNames: The Old Forge in Kilnaboy, Co Clare, is one of the last of its kind in Munster, writes Rose Doyle.

This is the story of an old forge in Kilnaboy, at the southern edge of the Burren in Co Clare. Whole and complete as it was in its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s, as it was when it began life in 1775, it's probably the only authentic standing forge in Clare - if not, according to its owner, in Munster.

The owner/keeper of The Old Forge at Kilnaboy is P J Curtis, a man of many parts and a lot of history whose father, and paternal forebears going back to 1775, all worked the forge. The family's place in the Clare landscape and horse world goes back even further, some 200 years further to when they first came from Wexford in the 1500s.

P J (Patrick Joseph, like his father before him) Curtis has a sure and certain sense of the value of memory in a culture, what it is we came from - "the pre-Celtic Tiger life" he calls it.

The Old Forge at Kilnaboy is, for him, an important physical reminder of all of that, and more. The life of The Old Forge, and of an earlier Co Clare, is bred in his bones. And that's how he tells the story; from the bones out and with verve.

"The forge was built in 1775, at the same time the family house was built. It was always there when I was growing up, just across the farmyard. The old schoolhouse around the corner was built in 1884, a sure sign the community was growing.

"The story goes that my father's people came to Clare from Wexford about the 1500s. The name was probably de Cuirteis and Norman to begin with. Pikeheads were hammered out in the forge in preparation for '98, for a rebellion that never came. I still have two of them in the house. Horses were always in the family, horses and the healing of horses."

The healing of horses; the other great talent bred in generations of Curtis' males. Smithys and farmers with the gift of healing horses, that was what the Curtis men were. (PJ's mother, a Conroy, with a musical pedigree who played the fiddle and was related to the Kilfenora Céilí Band, is the root of his passion for music).

"My father, Pat Joe, was always being called on by men on bikes and in cars from all over north-east Clare and Galway to heal horses. As soon as I was old enough, about five-to-six, I was taken to be a bellows boy in the forge, to keep the fire going. Part of it was to get in among the men, of course - I remember a farmer rescuing me from swinging off the tail of a stallion! From when I was about seven I was my father's apprentice and he would take me out healing."

But it was the healing that cured him of following in his father's footsteps.

"One of the healing cures was to bleed a horse from the jugular when it was suffering from Saree - a fatal blood disease. It was a delicate operation and involved filling a 2lb jam jar with blood. My job was to catch the blood and once, when I was about eight years old, the blood came out and poured all over me. I used dream about it afterwards and I'm sure it's what put me off a bit."

His father would reel off cures as in a litany. Black Pitch, Burgundy Pitch, Venus Turpentine, Resin, Beeswax, Mastic, Diaclin, Armenian Bowl, Oxacrotia, Euphorbium, Cantardes and Corrosive Sublimate. Twelve unique ingredients which he would then direct his son to "remember as you would the names of the twelve apostles". They made little sense to the 10-year-old P J Curtis. "Many of their elements, and names, were in old Latin, used thus by medieval monks so as to separate them from the lingua franca, Irish."

After the blood letting episode he found himself "more interested in listening to the radio and reading. Forge work was my father's main work in the 1940s and 1950s. Everyone had a horse; that didn't begin to change until the early 1960s when horses slowly began to disappear and rural Ireland became more motorised. My father worked the forge until his 70s, though there would have been only the odd straggler of a farmer coming at that stage." But still they came for the cures. And to the shop his mother had set up beside the house to supplement farm/forge income.

"We were what was known as a 'rambling' house, too, where people used gather together to talk and such. The forge, too, was a meeting place and talking shop, full of men chatting and smoking while the horses were being shoed. There were no women in the forge but, if a cart came with horse and farmer, then so would the wife and she would come into the shop, and then the house. The shop was busy, the house was busy and the forge was busy!

"Christmas was a time of huge activity. When my head wasn't stuck into AFM radio I'd be listening to their stories; it was great to hear their tall tales, all of it a way of passing on news and of keeping the community connected."

He was, he admits, "seduced by radio and books early on and was seen less and less in the forge. That was the beginning of the end - I was the eldest and wasn't going to take over. I went to school in Ennis, cycling there every morning, rain or shine, to face the Christian Brothers. They were without mercy. By the time I'd finished with schooling I knew I was no more cut out to be a farmer than an astronaut. My father knew it too and my younger brother wasn't naturally inclined towards the work."

What about the healing? Does he have the gift? "I've a cure for headaches in people but don't know about horses! I've never tried."

The Old Forge fell into disuse when his father died in 1980. He was 79. PJ, who had moved away, returned to live in the family home in the early 1990s. "I began to see how unique the forge was when I had a look at the Folk Park in Shannon and realised what was reproduced there was exactly what I'd grown up with.

"My father had kept everything he'd worked with and made; old shoes, fire tongs, everything for ploughs and gates, old cranes for over the fire - one of them with a beautiful swan's neck design. I cleaned it all and now there's even the original anvil and the huge bellows hanging on its contraption. All ready for action. You could go in there and start the fire and shoe a horse if you wanted to!

"As far as I know it's the only authentic standing forge in the south of Ireland. Most are recreations. People come to see it, though not often enough, because of its history. Horsey people drop by. I love people to visit it. It'll be here as long as I am."

All to do with preserving memories, carrying values of value into the future. "How can we go on without the treasure of stories from other generations?

"If we forget and cast the good aside it doesn't say much for the psychological health of the nation!"

P J Curtis has been a broadcaster, record producer, author and music historian and now lives in his native Burren.

His recollections and memories of growing up in his old forge, Music of Ghosts, is available from pjc1@eircom.net. His novel, The Lightning Tree, the story of Mariah, a healer and his father's cousin, has just been published by Brandon Books, price €15.99