High on Well Road, past the bookmakers, the bowling alley and Chinese takeaway, you can enjoy the best view of Auchinleck’s Orange parade as it slowly takes shape outside the community centre.

The flutes of the Patna band have returned from wetting their whistles at the Railway hotel, and are forming in orderly ranks. Braided union flags and lodge banners are held aloft; the marchers have fallen into line.

I am in the middle of a housing scheme in Ayrshire. This is not the beautiful coastal strip with its luxury golf courses and prosperous commuter towns, but the eastern side of the county, where the mining jobs have long gone from tough and insular communities. For some who live here it is only a dim sense of their Protestant roots that keeps them going.

It is in communities like this in East Ayrshire, Lanarkshire and West Lothian that the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland draws its strength. That’s why the residents of Well Road are out in their front gardens in their tracksuits and vests, grinning at each other and waiting for the fun to begin. But there is a curious difference to this march.

True, there are the bands, with their gaudy uniforms and their absurdly militant names, such as the Drongan Young Conquerors. But those trussed-up men with their bowler hats and sashes, who for generations have held up towncentre traffic all across Scotland, are nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s women who catch the eye.

Draped in a blue sash and at the head of the parade march is Helyne MacLean, the mouse-like grand mistress of the women’s wing of the Orange Order of Scotland. Behind her, dressed in their Sunday hats, are ladies from all over the country, who are spending their bank holiday Saturday celebrating the inauguration of a new women’s lodge in the village.

At the centre of the parade come the Auchinleck ladies, dressed in regulation orange and brown, proudly strutting along. These are the Sisters of Peden, Orange Lodge No 205. To outsiders they look militant and uncompromising; to their supporters on the streets, they are proud defenders of the faith. Staunch or scary, I’ve come to meet them and to find what makes them tick.

There is a clue to the Orange mindset in the very name of the new lodge, which, like so many others, invokes the memory of a bloody and unblinking Protestant fanatic, long forgotten by the rest of the human race.

Alexander Peden was a Calvinist firebrand who defied the King’s soldiers during the Killing Times of the 17th century. Peden was variously imprisoned on the Bass Rock, sentenced to transportation and forced to hide in the shadow of persecution, spending the last months of his life in a cold, dank cave. Surely a bitter and bloody chapter in Scottish history, a story you’d never wish to linger over? Not a bit of it.

After the march has ended, MacLean, nibbling on a piece of Dundee cake in the community centre, confides pleasantly: “The ladies themselves chose the name.”

Auchinleck has many surprises. Out on the streets, it’s easy to imagine a flash point is approaching as the parade begins to climb towards the village’s Catholic church. The crowd, though, remains in good humour, laughing and joking with the scrawny ribbon of spectators spread out along the route.

High on the verge, Eddie McGilvray, the keeper of chapel hall, waves as one of the marchers shouts a greeting. “It’s just something they do,” he says with a smile and a shrug. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with them when we’re watching the Talbot.”

McGilvray is talking about Auchinleck Talbot, the village’s football team. Just a week before, in a striking display of community solidarity, more than half the population of 7,500 — Catholic and Protestant, men and women — turned out to watch them win the Scottish Junior cup.

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