Bermudians young and old were reminded of the Island's rich heritage when the Bermuda Folklife Festival made an appearance last week at the Agricultural Exhibition.

Occupying a vast area on the southern part of the Botanical Gardens, the re-creation of the Folklife Festival held in Washington DC last year had displays in everything from the Bermuda of decades gone, from building techniques using Bermuda stone to the work by master woodsmen like Chesley Trott and Fred Phillips to fishpot demonstrations and boat building, including model boat building by Michael Hooper.

Anson Nash was there working on the old fitted dinghy which he is restoring for the Maritime Museum.

Then there were the things Bermudians used to entertain themselves with like go-karts, tops, jacks, bow and arrows and slingshots in the arts of play category...long before there were things like microwave ovens, cell phones and computers.

Former Cup Match players Dennis Wainwright, Gladstone Brown, Allan Douglas and historian Warrington (Soup) Zuill were among those helping share the history of Cup Match which is 100 years old this year, while Place's Gombeys also had an exhibition stall, explaining how the costumes are made.

"It (Festival) shared the grounds with the Agricultural Exhibition but they were two separate events," explained Jackie Aubrey, the Bermuda Programme Coordinator for the original Folklife Festival in Washington DC.

"The feedback we got has been excellent from the public and the participants. It was rewarding for them. There were two people from Smithsonian down here and they thought it was one of the best restaging they had ever seen.

"The content was the same but Smithsonian thought the location was far more beautiful than the National Mall in DC. The only thing we didn't have was the big Cup Match re-enactment because we didn't have the ground, but the things that were in Washington DC were also here. "

She added:"There wasn't anybody left out."

The Coordinator hasn't ruled out another staging of such a festival, though maybe with some variations.

"We wouldn't do an exact recreation, but we're finding more and more people to interview," she said.

Ms Aubrey explained:"The festival is a product of research and you don't want to be doing the one that was in DC year after year. You can do a whole festival on arts of the land which would be a good idea for the same time of year.

"We would have to have a lot of discussions to see how it would work. Certainly the participants would like to do something next year, but negotiations with the Ministry of Environment would need to be held to plan it."

Veteran masons were erecting buildings at Botanical Gardens and getting plenty of questions directed at them from curious onlookers. Water tanks with a dome top was the norm decades ago but aren't built these days.

"We were doing a tank and they asked `why are you doing the tank like that' and we told them that is the way the old timers did it," explained master mason Julian Van Lowe who was also a part of the Folklife Festival in Washington.

"They were curious about the dome top. The idea of the tank being arched is to keep the water cool. In those days they also made jello as a dessert and put it in the tanks.

"They mixed it, put in a bottle, tied it with string and put it in the tank to chill it. When they took it out the jello was set and ready for supper. They didn't have refrigerators then, just ice boxes."

Mr. Van Lowe admits they don't build the dome tops anymore, though many older houses still have them.

"I have seen them but never had the opportunity to build one," he revealed.

"That one (at the Exhibition) was my first one, believe it or not. It will remain there."

Larry Mills, who refers to himself as a vernacular architecture enthusiast, enjoys the restoration aspect of the building trade.

"Because there isn't that of a call for it, you do more bits and pieces as opposed to full restorations," he explained.

"I did quite a lot of projects for myself and have all been in that kind of style, which is where people know me from. Many people have seen old buildings but don't know the specific elements that make them up.

"I was more interested in the elements of the building and masonry and carpentry just followed."

Mr. Mills helped with the building of the dome water tank on the Botanical Gardens grounds.

"Many people have seen them but didn't realise what the components were," he says.

"They didn't understand why they were built the way they were built. But because I had some exposure to it years back we decided to do one. It was really pretty popular."

He added: "Many ancient civilisations have had the arch and they understood the principals of it. Many of the early settlers who came to Bermuda also understood it, and what they found here, obviously, was the Bermuda stone.

"When they wanted to build a tank for the water they needed to put a top on it. Pouring cement wasn't invented until the 1820s, so prior to that they needed some way of putting a top over a square structure and the arch was the natural way of doing it."

Mr. Mills thinks the older masons who have been in the trade for decades are deserving of the accolades they get as master builders. He sees himself as something different.

"There are go-kart enthusiasts, motocross enthusiasts, boat enthusiasts and I would call myself a vernacular architecture enthusiast," he says.

"Just like you can get these young guys who know so much about bikes, who can tell you all the stats and the success of riders around the world, I probably have done the same thing with Bermuda's buildings.

"Building around the world is basically the same, you put one thing on top of another. But what makes us unique is the material, especially the stone. I don't think there is any place else in the world where they cut stone like they did here...right out of the ground with hand tools.

"The kind of men who produced those stone quarries...I don't know if they make them anymore."