Brigadoon (in the bonny, heather-upholstered highlands of Scotland) is one famous disappeared village, and another less well-known one is Ginninderra, once sprinkled in our own region generally where Hall is today.

In Lerner and Loewe's fairytale magical musical Brigadoon, the Scottish village of that name has disappeared because of a miracle. But it is one of the terms of that miracle that it may reappear for a day every 100 years. And appear it does, and two bewildered 20th century New Yorkers trespass into it.

Alas (for real life is distressingly unlike a romantic, sentimental musical) we will never see the lost village of Ginninderra reappear. It is is gone for ever, erased not by a miracle but by the worldly creation of the federal capital territory and then its federal metropolis.

And yet, the next best thing to a magically reappearing Ginninderra is about to happen. On Tuesday and at the Hall School Museum and Heritage Centre the Friends of the Museum were putting the finishing touches to the exhibition Rediscovering Ginninderra. It is going to be a poignant display that asks us to remember, fondly, a lost village (albeit a rather sprinkled one) that in its heydays (from the early 1860s) was sufficiently village-like to boast a church, two schools, a store, a police station, boot-maker, post and telegraph office, School of Arts, annual show, sports teams and a hotel. But by 1915 this village was in eclipse.

The centrepieces of Rediscovering Ginninderra are three exquisite miniature models of three buildings of that old Ginninderra that survive today, albeit in varying degrees of decay and danger. They, the miniatures, "restored" to be as they were in 1910, are an old school house and schoolmaster's residence, a blacksmith's smithy with some of its tin roof lifted aside to allow us to see the brawny blacksmith plying his trade, and the substantial residence, Deasland. The latter is now threatened with extinction for it has Mr Fluffy contaminations.

The miniatures, peopled with little people and dogs and cats going about their business, are faithful recreations made by Vicki Coleman. She was at the museum on Tuesday to explain the miniatures constructions and contents to us. Wait till you see her trees and gardens with realistic-looking foliage made from moss! Everything is meticulously to scale, with sterling help given by an architectural draughtsman to recreate the buildings three-dimensionally from photographs.

The artist explained that the three miniature complexes are cunningly displayed at such a height that, while a standing adult sees them from above in a kind of crow's-eye view, small children (the miniatures are designed to especially enthral them) will have everything happening at eye level. They, the urchins, will be able to "eyeball" the miniatures and see many details. Here is a man about to be monstered by a very angry goose. Here are children in the schoolyard playing hopscotch in a hopscotch pattern actually chalked (the way they were) on to the dirt of the school yard.

Some of the tiny human and farmyard animal figures turn out to be true collectable, pre-war antiquities in their own right. Museum honorary curator Phil Robson went shopping on eBay for the legendary little lead figures (in the exhibition they include the burly lead blacksmith and the even burlier lead Clydesdale he has just shod, charging its owner eight shillings) made by a famous, long-established English toy company.

Coleman, an artist, illuminates that "We had some brainstorming about what we could do for the exhibition and I had built toy railways in an earlier life. So we thought of how to give this exhibition some visual aspect. All the buildings [set in the year 1910] are built out of sun-dried clay. Then there's some balsa wood, some paper, some synthetic wadding [and lots of moss and pebbles and twigs]."

"I guess what we're after is the comparison of what we have now with what they had then; there are storyboards [on the walls] about the buildings, but the miniatures give much more the visual awareness, because some of us learn visually, some textually.

"We hope people will inquire, and for example will ask why Deasland has an external kitchen [it was so that a fire in the kitchen didn't burn down the house].

"And when you come to the blacksmith's you've got the bellows, the furnace, his anvil on which he's probably making a horseshoe ... and we hope children will think and ask: 'What's he doing?' "

Her favourite, because there's so much going on, is the schoolhouse and schoolyard. "We researched some of the games the children would have played. And here's a vegetable garden, a clothes line, a poultry run [with tiny, to scale, chooks], to give eggs."

As well as the bewitching miniatures the exhibition boasts some touching items. An exhibition like this is bound to have, as well as living visitors, ghostly patrons from Ginninderra's past. It will not surprise if one of them is Margaret Gribble (nee Moore) marvelling at how pixie-slender she must have been in those days to have worn the (exhibited) wedding dress she wore in 1910 for her marriage to George Gribble.

Rediscovering Ginninderra is part of the Canberra and Region Heritage Festival. You, and Margaret, will be able to visit it from 10am to 4pm from April 2 -18 and on other occasions detailed on the Museum's website. museum.hall.act.au http://museum.hall.act.au