It is said that Lough Neagh was formed 2,000 years ago when a fountain was inadvertently left uncovered, and it supposedly has powers of petrification, turning into stone that which it touches for long enough.
Certainly the rivalries of planter and Gael around its shores have sufficient acquaintance with the Neagh to claim that lapidary distinction.
I never turn off that strip of late 20th-century engineering, the M1, at any of the junctions from Portadown through to Dungannon without feeling history immerse me, despite modern bungalow and shiny cars.
For the antiquity of the quarrel here, made complex by daily civility and the natural warmth of the people, still reaches out and touches one; in the names and the ruins lie tales of tribes who warred and wearied and finally rested, only to resume their war again and again but always without conclusion.
Lasting accord
And now in the Black Tyrone, once again, it is outcome deferred; and perhaps, please God this deferment will settle into the sort of lasting accord which has brought peace and understanding between French and German.
Yet why should it? The rubble of past disputes and the banners of present ones are everywhere. The hamlets along the southern shores of Lough Neagh, mere eruptions of houses between reed-beds and marsh, are marked as insistently as any border-crossing point was in old Europe.
There is something almost festive about this declaration of identity: a coronation colliding with a papal visit. Bunting, flags, cheery kerbstones; except of course you have to be a fool to think that they do not mask a culture of powerful grievance.
Castlecaulfield, once known as O'Donnelly's townland, stands at one end of the cultural divide. Built by Sir Toby Caulfield in 1614, he settled 41 English families around it , yet they were unable to prevent the house being burnt by the Donnellys in 1641. It was rebuilt and the area remains a loyal heartland, whose heart beats the more orange at every expectation that the Donnellys are back.
And down the road, Donaghmore - "the big fortified church" - where there was once a vast abbey, destroyed after the Reformation and now since all but vanished, with only the great high cross, which had been uprooted in 1641 and subsequently re-erected, serving as a reminder that this was a home of Celtic Christianity.
In the neighbouring townlands the bleaching greens and the mills are vestiges of another civilisation which overlayered but did not extirpate the one which preceded it. And now that creation of Protestant industry has gone the way of abbey and of high cross, to be replaced by an ecumenical culture of television and of bungalow, but at whose private hearths the ancient deities of tribe and identity are still celebrated.
What decides loyalty here is not simple race or patronym. The local unionist MP is, after all, a scion of the Mac Aonghusa tribe. The local SDLP dynasty is Currie, a Scottish name. A senior Sinn Fein figure did many years in jail for the attempted murder of a UDR man, thought he was himself the son of a local Protestant.
English surnames
Coalisland has many English surnames, a testament to the English miners who came to work the coalfields; but those miners married local girls and the bearers today of such English names are Catholic and nationalist. Perhaps identity tends to follow the maternal line, and it expresses itself in odd ways. Volkswagen drivers in this part of Tyrone, for example, are invariably Catholic.
Some soldiers must still have the misfortune to serve in Northern Ireland; perhaps the best equipped, psychologically and culturally, of any soldiers from Britain to do that arduous and tiresome duty are Welshmen. I have never heard of a Welsh unit being undisciplined or abusive, even though doing an utterly detestable and thankless job; and if such has ever happened, and humanly it must have done, it was entirely out of regimental or national character.
Welsh soldiers
The soldiers now serving in East Tyrone and North Armagh are from the Royal Regiment of Wales, Welsh soldiers led overwhelmingly by Welsh officers, and I recently had the great good fortune, along with certain local politicians and clergy from across the divide, to enjoy their liver-ruining hospitality. We think so often of how these troubles have spanned Irish generations, and of the suffering experienced by Irish communities. But this is true for these Welshmen too, some of whose fathers served in Northern Ireland 25 years ago or more; and the RRW has many dead from its own community to remember and to mourn, widows to console and fatherless children to mind in their valley homes.
If we are to do justice to the horrors of the past 30 years, we are going to have do more than release men from jail and agree on the shared instruments of power. The dead of Wales, or England or Scotland or wherever, must also be as honoured and remembered by us as are our own. Our troubles have spread misery far and wide, to homes which neither knew nor cared about the rancours of Tyrone or the fevers of Armagh. It is still not fashionable to say this within nationalist Ireland, but no matter: we should acknowledge a debt to those soldiers who served in the North who did a vile job both civilly and well.