I'll never again see anything in as direct a line from the antique world as Drumcree. I wandered around the field where the Orangemen were encamped and I looked down on what might have been a fragment from any small scene of battle, any time.
It might have been the Low Countries, say, in the 18th century. The bright-coloured clothes of the Orangemen and the dun and olive of the security forces were exotic in the mild landscape.
Men were standing on the dusty grass barking into mobile phones where ordinarily the only sounds are the skittering brown birds in the blowsy hedges and the traffic from the main road going across the middle distance into Portadown.
The burger vans, that would have been cookhouses in the past, were drawn up around the edges of the encampment. Men slept, exhausted as warriors, in their cars. Smoke rose from little fires in front of tents. Flags flew like standards from telephone poles. Slogans were pinned to poles and branches: Re-route the Residents of the Garvaghy Road Out of Ulster! You could smell steak, frying. Light bounced off the metal defences of the soldiers dug in at the bottom of the slope, as once it must have bounced off cannon.
What was most ancient, of course, was the obstinate opposition of strength to strength. In the modern world, the irresistible is manipulated out of confronting the immovable. Drumcree is not modern.
I hadn't wanted to go there. I don't want my mind to be locked into the Drumcree mindset. But I happened to be passing. I was coming back to Belfast from an evening's pleasant talking and drinking wine with people in Enniskillen. I'd set up this conversation precisely to get away from Orange reductionism and the way it is being allowed to define Northern Ireland.
I deliberately went to Fermanagh to hear talk about friendship and art and happy households and hate-free local patriotism and beloved children and hard work and great enjoyment of life. But the motorway back to Belfast has a turnoff that brings you to Drumcree in five minutes. I passed through a few British army checkpoints and walked up the back road to Drumcree as if through a time warp into the past.
All morning I'd been driving through towns and villages and along valleys and past schools and industrial estates and great fields where the mown hay was being gathered. People were going about the fundamental business of being people. Drumcree is a corner of Ulster. Not Ulster.
In fact, one of the subjects that had come up the night before was, what percentage of the people of Northern Ireland are involved with the Orange Order? Counting the women's lodges, and families, and friends? We were lolling around in a beautiful room, where one wall of glass looked out on a secret lake among hills, pearly-grey and emerald in the misty summer rain. Nine per cent, we worked out, lazily. Nine per cent of the population would be Orange people.
It occurred to me that this is about the same percentage as Sinn Fein people in the Republic, if you count the associates of those who vote Sinn Fein. The difference is that everyone else in the Republic doesn't retreat to their houses or go on holidays or flee out of the place once a year so that Sinn Fein can display its self-importance. Not one of the people around the table will be in their own homes today. The hotels in Northern Ireland are empty. The streets are deserted.
IT is almost unbelievable that the likes of Ruth Dudley Edwards claim that Northern society is not sick. The people of Northern Ireland aren't sick, and Orangeism itself isn't particularly sick. But the relationship of Orangeism to all the rest is most certainly sick.
"The Orange Order has been given a fool's pardon all my life," the solicitor amongst our company said. And the farmer said: "Orange-thinking people are going to have to change. But it is only in very recent times that people are seeing that there's something not pleasant at all about being an Orangeman. . ." He said this slowly. Because it is only beginning to become evident to people like him, too.
He, like the other locals around the table, had fathers who were Orangemen. They remember the Twelfths of their childhoods as magic days, full of ice-cream and strawberries and coins collected from the haystacks where labourers vigorously courted the girls, and the comedy of men who hardly ever got drunk getting drunk. It is only now that they see the triumphalism in the Twelfth marches. "Up to now," the architect whose marvellous home we were in said, "croppies on both sides lay down".
Now, it is the middle classes who are lying down. It is the middle ground that the extremists are attempting to render uninhabitable.
These people around the table in the beautiful house are people of the middle. Up to now, there was no way they could exert the moderating influence that the middle always exerts. There was no politics. But now, there is a way.
"The elections for the Assembly were the first ever where all of us were able to vote for the same people," one guest said. "In spite of everything, things are more hopeful than they've been for 30 years," the doctor - who knows both communities well - said.
"But they're still hopeless," the teacher said.
We tried to get away from the same old subject. The conversation drifted a bit." Is Camille Paglia one of those Tara Palmer-Tompkinson people?" the farmer was asking at one point. Someone else was talking about the Bee Gees. But we could not keep away from the problems around us. It is one of the curses of Northern Ireland. You can't get mental rest from it.
Many, many people who belong to Northern Ireland love it. Yet again, this weekend, they are forced to be ashamed of it. My companions talked about their feelings for Fermanagh. "It is, by and large, an equitable society here," someone said. "It's a lot less polarised than Dublin." "That's right," a woman who works as a school secretary said, "here you can socialise with everyone. The people here are soft people, not like Tyrone." And the farmer said, "It's the topography that's best of all. I walk around the fields and I feel so privileged. . ."
More bottles of wine were opened. There were oatmeal wafers and runny cheeses. Logs burned bright in the stove, and outside, the mist on the lake thickened. The people smiling and chatting around the table were handsome and stylish. They are Europeans. But until conventional politics take hold, they are in thrall to the antique forces on display at Drumcree. "I think that southerners coming to the North from the South," the architect said, "think of it like visiting a mental home. You only do it if you have a relation there you have to visit." He paused, and then he added sadly: "I can't say I blame them."