While attention was focused on the Apprentice Boys march in Derry last weekend, it is likely that few noted the site of the march, the walls of the city.
These have featured in loyalist myth and song for centuries, but for one woman at least they have another significance, an archaeological one.
Ms Marion Meek is an archaeologist with Northern Ireland's Environment and Heritage Service, and has been working on Derry's walls for years.
"I feel as if I have been working at it for 40 years," she says. "I have lived with the walls since I was a child. My father was an architect and in charge of historic monuments, and I'm an archaeologist looking after monuments."
Derry's walls came into state care in 1955, and have required substantial maintenance since. "What has changed is not so much the walls as the town. Towns develop, and each time something changes the walls have to respond," Ms Meek says.
The inside of the walls used to be just earth, and they only got their stone facing in the 19th century. Some buildings adjoined the walls. "So when a building comes down, we have to make the walls up. When a new building goes up, we have to work out its relationship to the walls."
This was the case recently with the Millennium Theatre, now under construction. After the work began, the wall beside it had to be rebuilt. "There is a team of stonemasons working on the walls all the time," says Ms Meek.
There was no difficulty in recruiting them. With so many stone buildings in Derry, including guild buildings and churches, there was always employment in this trade. "The Environment and Heritage Service is a major employer of stonemasons. If necessary, we train them. We have an apprentice there at the moment."
The service wanted to encourage the people of Derry to reclaim the walls and use them for leisure and activities, Ms Meek says, as "people got out of the habit during the Troubles".
Already both the tourist office and local tour operators are promoting the walls as a resource. Both offer walking tours of the walls, taking in other city monuments such as St Columb's Cathedral.
But even without being organised, tourists are clearly fascinated by these fortifications, which measure about 40 feet across in some places. Earlier this week German, Spanish and French, as well as English, could be heard on the walls, which offer a commanding view of the city and surrounding countryside.
The walls also provide a safe vantage-point for insights into more recent political history. At the top of Artillery Street the walls overlook the Protestant Fountain enclave, with the remnants of an August 12th bonfire on open ground. Further along walkers can see the Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall inside the walls, and look down on the Bogside, with its array of republican murals, at the bottom of the hill on the other side.