He's walking all alone down the road towards the centre of Portadown from the lovely early 19th-century parish church. In his head, he's not alone at all. Behind him, the band is playing, the banners are billowing, the stout, sober-faced men in their Sunday best and their vivid collarettes are staying effortlessly in step.

He is wearing only a blue tracksuit top and his off-white Gap jeans. You know what's going in his head, though, because of what he's doing with the length of bright blue plastic piping he has in his hand.

Every few steps, he twirls it up in the air. Sometimes, he just tries to catch it neatly on his chest. Sometimes, he tries to flip it up and over his shoulder and catch it with one hand behind his back. In truth, he seldom manages either feat. He's so bad at it that the only music that accompanies his halting progress is the hollow smack of the plastic pipe on the ground.

Then again, he is only 10. At that age, you can block out the reality that there are no bands, no banners, no marching feet, that the swirling stick is only a tatty bit of discarded piping you can't even catch, and give yourself over almost totally to the heroic fantasy.

Since he doesn't talk to strangers, and certainly not to strangers with southern accents, you can but speculate. It would not be surprising if he extended the fantasy a little further, so that instead of walking down the Seagoe Road towards Portadown, he was leading his parade from the other so-called Mother Church of Portadown, Drumcree Parish Church, along the Garvaghy Road. Then, of course, the fantasy would be complete.

Watching this kid on a quiet, overcast afternoon three days before Drumcree, two things come to mind. One is that the Orange marching tradition genuinely is a tradition. It occupies, within its own constituency, the kind of cultural space that, for example, the pleasure of seeing kids with hurleys occupies in the Catholic community. Something distinctive, something that passes between generations, is at stake.

The other thought is that the childhood fantasies that are wrapped around these distinctive pleasures eventually come into conflict with reality. You realise that you're not going to score the last-minute goal that wins the All-Ireland for your county. You realise that you're not going to lead King William's Defenders No 127, or Corcrain Purple Rocket No 339, or Dr Kane's Crimson Star No 417, down the Garvaghy Road. You grow up.

When most of the older members of the Orange Institution's Portadown District were children, the Garvaghy Road did not really exist. The roadway was there, of course, as it was when the Orange service at Drumcree Parish Church started in 1807. But it was, through all that time, a country lane of the kind that still exists on the small, much-filmed stretch between the church and the edge of the Ballyoran estate.

Until the 1960s the march back from the service was a pleasant stroll between lush fields. In their appeal to the notion that they merely want to do what they have always done, the Orangemen are really pretending that the world of their childhood still exists, that the unromantic housing estates and the Catholics who inhabit them do not exist. Sensing that tacit implication, the Catholics choose to make their presence felt.

The most striking thing about the Garvaghy Road itself is that for a place that has acquired such a mythic significance, it is so utterly inconsequential. Any day of the week, except next Sunday, you can walk it in 15 minutes. What you will see is, if anything, slightly less interesting than the hundreds of similar roads through working-class estates in any substantial town in these islands.

Less interesting because, as the Orangemen love to tell you, very few houses actually front on to the road. The estates of Ballyoran, Garvaghy Park, Ashgrove, Churchill Park are set back in their own self-contained warrens. Garvaghy Road itself is mostly a place to pass along rather than a place to live.

Even duller is what has now become for the Orangemen a kind of promised land, the sacred territory into which you would emerge triumphant if you won the battle and marched down Garvaghy Road.

This symbolic destination is currently marked by a traditional Orange arch erected, more in hope than expectation, by the Parkmount Loyal Orange Lodge. What actually surrounds the arch, however, is classic urban blight: derelict houses, a motorway flyover, industrial buildings, old warehouses.

It takes an immense act of will to imagine these places as some kind of holy ground. You have to pretend that the road is still a beautiful rural byway, that the depressed fag-end of Portadown you arrive at is some kind of Protestant Mecca. You have to walk down the road like that 10year-old boy, locked in a vision of your own creation, impervious to the reality of a very ordinary Irish town.

You also have to ignore the real mood of that town. It's easy to forget that the statue of Col Saunders, founder of Irish unionism, in Market Street means much less to a lot of people than the picture of Col Saunders on the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet beside the Edenderry Orange Hall.

The place is so saturated with journalists that there's no trouble finding ready sources for the quotes that will put flesh on cliches about mounting tension and age-old hatreds.

One set of journalistic impressions from the outside is, perhaps, as banal as any other, but for what it's worth, the dominant note to emerge from conversations with randomly encountered locals on Thursday was one of fatalistic weariness. They wish it would all go away, but don't believe they can make it do so.

Drumcree has become like bad weather, unpleasant but unavoidable. And those who can afford it do what people always do to escape bad weather. They get the hell out of the place.

Portadown's two main travel agents, Thomas Cook and Thomson Travel, have been frantically busy in the last fortnight. Business has been fantastic this week, with people willing to go almost anywhere and pay almost anything just to be far away from whatever may be about to happen. It may be of some small significance that demand this year is exceptionally high.

If so many people are fed up with the whole thing, why does Drumcree retain its symbolic power? What, if anything, is so special about Portadown that the kind of disputes that have become at least manageable elsewhere turn into an epic conflict here?

The answer that most Orangemen will give is historical. Co Armagh is the cradle of the institution. The Drumcree service itself is the oldest Orange service in Ireland. The sense of an unbroken continuity, of a tradition that has survived almost two centuries, is crucial to their attitude.

The problem with this notion is that it is simply untrue. The deep significance of the Drumcree parade, that it commemorates the Battle of the Somme in 1916, is itself evidence of the changing meaning of the parade. Before the first World War, it meant one thing: afterwards, it meant something else.

During that war, moreover, the order cancelled the annual parades because, as the Portadown headquarters put it, "our celebrations should be modified to suit the circumstances of the time". If that motto were to be adopted now, it would have at least as much historical sanction as the current insistence on carrying on regardless.

The Orange festivities, in any event, have always been a moveable feast. The idea that they have to occur in the same places every year ought to be news to Portadown Orangemen themselves, since the Armagh County rally for the 12th of July is literally a moveable feast.

There was no Twelfth parade in Portadown between 1916 and 1927. Subsequently, Portadown parades were intermittent, occurring only in 1935, 1945, 1954, 1962, 1971, 1982, 1993 and 1999. The notion that Orange festivities must be tied to a particular place has no basis in the order's own practice.

There is, however, a very different connection between a sense of place and the Drumcree standoff. For what is immediately apparent to an outsider coming into Portadown is the failure to keep open a neutral public space. Unlike most other towns and cities in Northern Ireland, Portadown hasn't managed to keep its centre as a free space which people enter as individuals, rather than as members of a tribe.

Physically, the main streets are festooned with red-white-and-blue bunting, Union flags and Ulster flags. Psychologically, Catholics feel genuinely uneasy in what ought to be the common ground where most of the town's shops and facilities are located.

Pushed back as they are into their own territory literally on the other side of the tracks, Catholics in turn have created their own kind of psychological no-go area. The Tunnel and Garvaghy Road areas are decked out with Tricolours, declaring them as the exclusive property of nationalists. The Corcrain Orange Hall, stranded on the wrong side of the divide by demographic changes, has the air of a fort under siege and has been subject to four arson attacks since 1985.

This kind of division, of course, has happened all over Northern Ireland. But without the safety valve of a relatively neutral public space, the sense of territorial grievance has acquired a sharper edge in Portadown.

The real issue, therefore, is not what happens on the Garvaghy Road but what doesn't happen in the centre of the town. Unless Catholics can feel equally at home in Main Street and Market Street, they will be inclined to protect the Garvaghy Road as their own inviolable territory. And so long as they define it in this way, some Protestants will continue to try to live out a nostalgic fantasy in which the Garvaghy Road is still an untouched rustic lane.

fotoole@irish-times.ie