The Laois Library quiz has MICHAEL HARDINGstumped, but he discovers some innocent treasures in the library's collection

WEDNESDAY WASN’T hectic in the little library in Mountrath. Two librarians were re-arranging white shelving units, which run on wheels and make them easy to manoeuvre.

It’s a bright little library, with grey carpet, white walls and more than a dozen computers. A young man was working away on his laptop, doing an essay. A middle-aged man was reading the paper. His phone rang.

“I’m in the library,” he said. “I can be at the house in five minutes.” He hung up, folded the newspaper and left.

Then Michel Moylan arrived in a crisp shirt. He was checking out the venue, for his performance in the afternoon.

Moylan brings history alive for young people with performance and storytelling. Whether the subject is Vikings or Tudors, the children get to wear the clothes, see the weapons, and examine the cutlery; he had more than 20 bookings by noon.

On the reception desk, there was a bundle of A4 sheets – a quiz with 20 questions about Heritage in Laois.

It was called the Laois Library Local History Quiz. “You can take the questions home,” the lady explained, “write down your answers, and return them to the library by the end of September.” Personally, I hadn’t a clue what buildings Gandon designed in Laois, or who wrote The Landscape of the Slieve Bloom, so I told her I wouldn’t bother. She looked disappointed.

But I was amazed at what wonders were hidden in the library.

I sat all morning with photocopies from the National Folklore Collectionof 1937, reading the scrawl of little children who must be very old now, if they have not already gone to the graveyard.

I suppose they have learned, as we all do, that “summers lease hath all too short a date,” and “every fair from fair sometime declines”. Yet their humble homework, on a winter’s night 72 years ago, when they took down stories from grandparents, who were born in the time of the Famine, has become a jewel in Ireland’s cultural heritage. Their tiny scrawls, their innocent phrases remain on the pages for their grandchildren to examine with wonder.

I began to vividly imagine two young girls, Sarah and Maudie, sitting with William Brophy, the blacksmith, explaining to him why they were so concerned about his forge.

“It’s our homework,” they might have said, “to record something interesting about your work.” He informed them that there were two forges in the parish.

“Both forges are much the same,” he told them, “regular buildings; but the bellows used in Loury’s is a leather one, while the one in mine consists of a fan driven by the back wheel of a bicycle and the gear wheel and chain. The pedal stem is the handle.” I suppose he was proud of his technology.

“My forge is a stone building with a thatched roof, and a hole in the middle of the roof, to let out the smoke. The entrance is wide and roomy. The door consists of two parts hinged in the middle.” “I shoe horses and asses and sharpen farm implements. I use sledges, hammers, pincers, an anvil and iron cutters.” He told them that he also “shoe-ed” wheels in the open air, on a stone ring, called the binding ring.

Iron fillings from the forge were thrown into the manure heap because they enriched the land. And there was a cure for warts in forge water.

Another child had made a list of all the signs there are for rain: when the wind is coming from Borris-in-Ossory; when the train is heard clearly coming into Mountrath station.

A rainbow in the morning. A dog eating grass. Horseflies biting. Swallows flying low. A cloud coming over the sun. Smoke coming down the chimney. Froth coming down a river. Ducks cackling loudly.

Wild geese flying north. Curlews at night. The sun setting into a bank of cloud. A circle around the moon. The wind blowing from the south.

Clearly the school children of Mountrath could read the sky and the earth with all their senses, in 1937, though perhaps they never suspected that the forge would become obsolete, as people turned to motorised vehicles.

Outside the library, modern life rumbled at a ferocious rate through the streets of Mountrath; an endless juggernaut of lorries, Fed-ex vans, flower trucks from Holland, and buses heading for Dublin. Volvos carried cement, and there was a Komatsu digger on the back of a glistening chrome and black Scania; all horns were honking.

Behind some trucks there was a steady line of Passats, Lagunas, Almeras, and then another enormous juggernaut of commercial transport. Their big wheels splattered pedestrians with puddle water and terrible noises, as they rushed to meet ferries, or deadlines in far off cities, and a soft misty rain enveloped Mountrath.