Outside Keenan’s Bar, an official Northern Ireland tourist information sign hangs which serves as the “centre point” for Walsh’s walking tours. South Armagh is predominantly nationalist, with much of the population being opposed to any form of British presence, especially that of a military nature.

The southern part of the county has been a stronghold of support for the IRA, earning it the nickname "Bandit Country". The policing is a wee bit more normal than it was but let’s face it, it’s not normal,” McConville adds.In 1981, 10 Republican prisoners starved themselves to death, protesting for political status - the right to be treated as prisoners of war. On 22 July 2021 the record for highest outside air temperature ever measured in Northern Ireland was set in Armagh City when a reading of 31. Adjoined to the southern shore of Lough Neagh, the county covers an area of 1,327km 2 (512sqmi) and has a population of 194,394 as of the 2021 census. But you don’t go running about Cross, going, ‘this is affecting my emotional condition’, you’d have been laughed out of the town at the time. They treated us with disdain,” says Mc Conville, standing in the middle of Crossmaglen Rangers’ pitch.

Patterson shows us how the militarised boundary line of old has morphed into an invisible and semi-wild frontier, where the ghosts of a thirty-year war continue to haunt the ‘ceasefire generation’.Oneilland West, like Oneilland East, was once O'Neill territory, until it was then held by the MacCanns, who were Lords of Clanbrassil.

Between 1971 and 1997, there were 123 British soldiers killed in south Armagh – about a fifth of British military Trouble-related deaths in the North – along with 41 Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) police officers and 75 civilians.The Bandit (Bloom) is on the run with Crystal "the Beauty" ( Kathy Ireland), a young woman being pursued by a mobster ( Tony Curtis), a bounty hunter ( Joseph Cortese) and the FBI. Oisin McConville: 'You’d kick the ball over the bar and if it went into the barracks they’d stick a knife in it and then throw it back over. The British army helipad has disappeared and a windowless army bunker that backed on to the police station has been replaced with a bread making factory. Hours earlier, Lord Louis Mountbatten, a high profile member of the Royal Family, had been killed by a PIRA bomb while on holiday at Mullaghmore in County Sligo.