Border people everywhere are suspicious and taciturn, or so the legend goes: watch their backs against the stranger, sit between two peoples but belong to neither, writes Fionnuala O Connor.
Undaunted, researchers are about to start burrowing along the 256-mile line across this island. Prof Brian Graham, leader of the project for the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages in the University of Ulster, wants to collect an oral history "of folk whose daily routine straddles or adjoins the political frontier . . . the Borderlands . . . the traditions of Protestants and Catholics who have grown up along it."
He promises various forms of public record at the end. It sounds an unusually interesting academic project: I only wonder about that record.
A childhood spell in the borderland of south Armagh was an education. This was before the Troubles, before Europe, and before south Armagh, to the world outside, meant IRA snipers picking off soldiers from a ditch a quarter of a mile away, or bodies dumped on Border roads.
South Armagh then for many meant smuggling: driving pigs back and forward to maximise their value, the early version of Eurosubsidy cow-shuttling. For us timid outsiders, it meant nipping up to Dundalk for butter and cigarettes.
We lived on an "unapproved" road that ran back and forth across the United Kingdom's single land frontier with no pretence of checks or border-posts.
We breathed in the daily scornfulness of people who went to sleep in a 32-county (British) Ireland and woke up in the "wee Six" ruled from Stormont, 50 miles away over bad roads in Protestant Belfast.
Straight up the road was Dundalk, Co Louth. Down the road was Blayney - Castleblayney, Co Monaghan - and we were Co Armagh.
We played customs and smugglers, not cowboys and indians. "Let the Hanrattys [not their real name] be the customs," said our mother out of mistaken tact, "you be the smugglers."
Chances are the Hanrattys gloried in their smuggler parents and despised all customs men. After the politically correct casting of the main roles, we insisted the youngest of both families be the pigs. Dead pigs, since they were too young to argue, hours hanging by their numb fingers from the rafters of an old shed.
To a child born elsewhere, the biggest local characters were the smuggler barons. Widowed Mrs Hanratty ruled, flame-haired and generously made, spitting on her hands to clinch a deal on Fair Day in Blayney, crushed pack of Sweet Afton swept grandly forth from the bosom as she held forth in our kitchen, a place too dull and small for her, or while pouring sherry in her parlour. Locked when not in use, according to legend, for sedately entertaining the sergeant while lorryloads of pigs went squealing down the lane.
If you detect a concern not to name names, you are correct. Decades later, no matter the context, it is still a reflex to hesitate about identifying anybody in that part of the world.
If I hadn't known that from the age of nine, I'd have picked it up sharpish returning as a reporter. In some places the visiting newshound might profit by saying: "We lived around here when I was a child." South Armagh is not like that. Telling the stranger nothing and your neighbours nothing they don't know already is bred in the bone.
There is more to the Border than south Armagh, but its secretiveness is hardly unique.
"We will do about 180 in-depth interviews," says Prof Graham. "The output will be displayed in a travelling exhibition that will tour the Border counties." One of the team will work on folklore.
The study promises a "high-tech" photographic record, a book, a CD-ROM, availability on the Web.
It hopes to "peel back the layers of community experience" and explore "how people have lived with, or circumvented the physical frontier in good times and bad."
Prof Graham thinks it likely to turn up "tales of old-style smuggling, but a darker side may also record experiences of fear, suffering and claims of 'ethnic cleansing' that reflect 30 years of conflict."
Today's smugglers must already be in conclave to demarcate "old style" from new, and weigh the merits of turning up. The darker side may stay dark.
Another Border project works with small Protestant communities who long ago woke up to find that they were now in a Protestant state, surrounded by freshly-alienated neighbours. They survived the Troubles in their birthplace.
But some see community developments funded by "Peace and Reconciliation" money as another hostile front, dominated by republicans.
Will their stories be part of the travelling exhibition?
Only the cantankerous would wish the project anything but well. It's just hard to imagine the borderland allowing outsiders to peel back their layers for the neighbours to see.