The line in the sand has been drawn. Three months on, the Portadown Orangemen continue to maintain a token presence outside Drumcree church in opposition to the Parades Commission's decision to reroute their parade away from the mainly nationalist Garvaghy Road in July.
There are no longer tents pitched in the fields surrounding the church. There are no fast-food stalls. Just about a dozen men standing outside the church on the Drumcree Road were the remaining visible signs that the 24-hour protest was continuing. There is also no violence. Despite the small number, Billy Laverty believes Orangemen will be allowed to march down Garvaghy Road, "sooner rather than later" or else he wouldn't be standing here.
David Jones, spokesman for the Portadown Orange District Lodge, argues that while many within the Orange Order may define Protestant culture as "the men with the bowler hats and the collarettes walking down the town", there is more to it than that. It involves music. It involves banners carried by the lodges, tracing the history of prominent people in Orange culture, their input on the community in terms of civic, religious and business interests, and also "some of the shortfalls", such as the Home Rule crisis.
"If you didn't have the parades, up to a point you wouldn't have the music and you wouldn't have the banners, for there would be no need for them. When we are being denied the right to march, we are being denied our Protestant culture. That's very much what the whole Drumcree scenario is about," he says. The marching issue forms the "bedrock" of Protestant culture "because everything - our heritage and history - stems from that". Drumcree is "not simply about being able to walk past Catholic homes" but about being "denied the right to celebrate our culture in the way we have done for hundreds of years" by the Parades Commission. Garvaghy Road was an "open arterial route" which should not be blocked to Orangemen. If Protestant culture defines marching as an integral part of its culture, how does this fit in with the Orange Order's code of civil and religious liberties for all? Mr Jones says the order believes "in the freedom for every individual to live their life whatever way they want, whether they be Protestant or non-Protestant, taking in Ro man Catholic and Jewish or whatever". Asked how this can be reconciled with the view of Garvaghy Road nationalists that their religious and civil liberties are not being acknowledged since they see the Orange parade as "triumphalist", he replies:
"They [the Garvaghy Road residents] are looking for segregation, but we are looking for integration. The very root of the civil rights protests in the early 1960s was the fact that Catholics were being forced, and at this point in time we are saying, the way the Garvaghy Road are presenting themselves, they want a ghetto. They want their own area. We believe there should be no cultural no-go areas in the United Kingdom."
Yet Portadown is divided, even to the extent of which side of the pavement to take to get into the town centre. Coming in from the Dungannon Road roundabout heading towards the town centre, Ulster flags and Union Jacks fly on every lamp-post and loyalist slogans take up most of the wall space on the right-hand side of the road. Accordingly, Tricolours fly from every lamp-post on both sides of Garvaghy Road.
Mr Jones suggests that if Orangemen wanted to be "triumphalist", then "we could take our Twelfth parade down the Garvaghy Road or we could attempt to do that, with banner, Lambeg drums banging and with all the paraphernalia of a Twelfth of July parade, but we have not done that".
Mr Jones believes nationalists' objections to the Garvaghy Road march stem from the fact that they "don't seem to appreciate how important marching is to the Protestant culture . . . They can laugh at it, they can sneer at it, they can say it looks funny seeing people dressed in fancy dress. What's the purpose of it? They can say it is coat-trailing and triumphalist but that's because they have no appreciation of it."
Mr Jones denies that the parades are a coat-trailing exercise and says there must come a time when nationalist and Protestant/ Orange culture can coexist. "Whether people like it or not, there has to come that time when the two cultures coexist together because if they don't, it means that one has supremacy over the other. And when one has supremacy of the other, what is there?
"What I often feel is that many in the nationalist/republican camp need to be very, very careful and very, very aware that they don't become guilty of the sins that they accused unionists of in the 1930s and 1940s."
Today the Orangemen will parade into the town centre to highlight what they see as the "unfairness" and "inadequacy" of the Parades Commission's decision and to show their support for the Drumcree protesters.
While it was regrettable that protesters and police officers were injured at Drumcree and violent incidents took place in the town centre, including the burning of three Catholic-owned businesses, the Orange Order's "whole existence", including the parades, "is too important", says Mr Jones.
This is why the protest at Drumcree will continue until Orangemen are allowed to march down Garvaghy Road.