"LET them round again," the woman in the orange shirt yelled at the RUC, "It was too short." Smiles all round. The sun came out as the 100 or so Apprentice Boys stepped off Derry's walls after a brisk, proud walk on Saturday morning.
Nearby a toddler played with a plastic Lambeg drum and the small crowd outside the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall sang The Sash and God Save the Queen.
The Apprentice Boys' leader, Alistair Simpson, told the crowd he was delighted with the turnout.
"We're not out to do harm to anyone," he said. "We're only here to stand for civil and religious liberty."
He thanked nationalists for allowing the march to go ahead peacefully and said this could be "a new beginning".
In August, after the RUC blocked the route, he had told a bigger, angrier crowd that it was "our firm intention to walk these city walls at a time of our own choosing".
However, Mr Simpson said talks with the Bogside Residents' Group (BRG) about next year's march were unlikely, due to what he described as underhand tactics in the run up to the August march.
Earlier, hundreds of police and soldiers stood by as the city held its breath for the 25 minute circuit.
The army had worked in darkness, screening off the section of the walls overlooking the Bogside. Some bright spark had picked a nice shade of green. Shortly before the march started 10 soldiers with an explosives sniffer dog walked through the RUC cordon and on to the walls.
By 8.30 a.m. a crowd of nationalist protesters had gathered at Butcher's Gate, as the Apprentice Boys filed into the Memorial Hall with their bowler hats in plastic bags.
The protesters carried placards demanding an end to sectarian marches. Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness and Gerry O'Hare stood quietly together.
"The reason I'm here is to keep the peace," Mr McGuinness said. "The insensitive aspects of loyalist parades need to be resolved through dialogue. When today's events pass over we will still have to resolve all these difficulties."
At around 9 a.m. the head of the BRG, Donncha MacNiallais, made his way to the RUC line, followed by 12 other protesters. Only he and fellow BRG member Charles Lamberton were allowed on to the walls. The RUC wanted the 13 protesters to agree not to obstruct the marchers. Mr MacNiallais said the police had "no right to dictate to us how we should protest".
At 9.35 a.m. the Lambeg drumbeat started and Mr MacNiallais and Mr Lamberton were lifted out of the way by the RUC and held down as the march passed. On the top of Butcher's Gate the Apprentice Boys band struck up and the crowd chanted, "Scum" and "I, I, IRA".
Mr Mark Durkan, an SDLP councillor, said later that the Apprentice Boys had agreed to wait until they reached the next gate before the band would play. And the early start had been an unfortunate cause of some "ugliness".
He said he was pleased the march had passed off peacefully. "If they'd wanted to make trouble they could have made more trouble."
After the march had passed, Mr MacNiallais stood on an RUC Land Rover to read a speech to the protesters. He called the march a "disgraceful scene". He said the BRG objected to the march because its organisers had not "seen fit to negotiate with us".
The Apprentice Boys were part of an organisation that wanted to "pretend we don't exist", he said. But "Irish men and Irish women" had been there for centuries, "and we haven't gone away, you know".
The crowd laughed and there were some cheers at the echo of Gerry Adams's reference to the IRA, used again at the end of the speech: "And we're not going away," Mr MacNiallais said.
