For years, Cherry Smyth watched the Bann flow into the Atlantic Ocean at Portstewart in Co Derry and dreamed of leaving Troubles-hit Northern Ireland.
Now, almost 40 years after she made a new life for herself in London, she and English writer Craig Jordan-Baker are making a pilgrimage from the source of the Bann at Slieve Muck in the Mourne Mountains to the mouth of the river.
For Ms Smyth, the eight-day walk will mark a different kind of homecoming, something she described as “facing myself”.
“Like many Irish immigrants I thought I’d go for a year and do a course and go somewhere else or come back,” she said.
“Most of the time I was looking out to the Atlantic and seeing where I would leave to go, not looking in at the river."
She added: “I was very shaped by the Troubles and I have written a little bit about it but this feels like a way to very slowly inch my way back to thinking about it and the legacy of it.
"How do we reframe those things? If the river divides us, how does it join us and how can we pull people together who want to think about peace differently and difference differently?”
The writers began their walk on June 30 and hope to complete it by Wednesday, July 7.
The Bann borders or flows through four of the north’s six counties and separates the historically richer, mainly Protestant east, with the poorer, mainly Catholic west.
Speaking before the walk, Ms Smyth said she wants to explore questions of identity, particularly after Brexit.
“I am very interested in the third (group of) people who have emerged who aren’t Catholic or Protestant and who aren’t invested in Britain or who necessarily want to be part of a united Ireland,” she said.
Although she regularly returns to Portstewart to see her family, she is now considering whether to move home, following several friends who returned and are “loving the quality of life”.
Ms Smyth said while she was keen to leave the north as a teenager, Southampton-born Mr Jordan-Baker, whose grandfather is from Banbridge, Co Down, strongly identifies with Ireland.
“We both have a very strong affinity with Irish literature,” she said.
“As he says, I was always dreaming of a way to get out of Northern Ireland and he was always dreaming of a way to get there, so I liked that kind of balance.
“He is very involved in Northern Ireland current affairs which I had enough of growing up.”
Ms Smyth got the idea for the walk during a drive she took last year from the Beara peninsula to Portstewart.
“Walking is connected for me with thinking and that creative stillness,” she said.
“Lockdown has made us more attentive to things around us and I think people are looking at walking in a different way.
She added: “We’re looking at pilgrimage as a route that’s on the land but also in your body because you have to go through pain in order to get there usually”.
“You have to put your feet on the ground and go through being tired and fed up. All of that is part of the process.”
The pair are walking between eight and 12 miles a day, starting at Slieve Muck in the Mournes. An eel fisherman has agreed to take them across Lough Neagh and they will also canoe part of the way from Toome to Portglenone.
“I wanted to be on the river rather than just walk along it. I’m planning to swim in it too,” she said.
Along the way, they will be visiting key sites near or around the river including Goward Dolmen in Co Down and the mesolithic Mountsandel fort on the eastern bank of the Bann.
The pair will also interview environmental scientists, writers and archeologists about the significance of the river.
Mr Jordan-Baker, a novelist and academic, said he had been interested in Northern Ireland and its politics since he was a child and often returned in the summer to stay with family in Banbridge.
He is a nephew of Kate Carroll, whose husband, PSNI Constable Stephen Carroll, was murdered by dissident republicans in 2009.
Although Mr Jordan-Baker is familiar with the part of the river around Banbridge he said “there’s a lot that I don’t know”.
“I’m seeing my relative ignorance as a strength because I’m interested in exploring the gaps in my knowledge and the differences between what I imagine I’ll find out and what I actually will find out,” he said.
“There’s obviously the Bann divide, in the way that the river structures political consciousness in the north. Then there are a lot of historical events that happened around the Bann like the Portadown Massacre (of 1641).
“One thing I’m not familiar with is the actual geography and topography of the Bann.”
Mr Jordan-Baker said he wanted to “engage with the landscape rather than just rushing through it”.
“Every day we’ll be interviewing or talking to someone,” he said.
"We’re going to be taken across Lough Neagh by an eel fisherman. I’m really interested in how aspects of the landscape have shaped the stories and the perspectives of different people.”
He said the pair aim to use the Bann “as a stepping off point” to look at questions of identity, particularly after Brexit, in Northern Ireland's centenary year.
“I think using the landscape… we can get different kinds of answers and hear stories from people about the significance of the river and how they see themselves situated in Northern Ireland as a difficult, contentious, contested and incredibly complicated place," he said.
He added: “Lough Neagh is probably the place I’m most looking forward to going to because it’s got such an interesting ecology… I think it will be a unique experience to go across the lough with someone who knows it intimately.”
Mr Jordan-Baker joked he was a “a mild Brexit obsessive in terms of Northern Ireland”.
“I think it’s re-exposed the lines along which people identify,” he said.
“Irish unity is on the cards in a way that it wasn’t before Brexit. The concerns of the unionist community are inflamed... Brexit was the spark which started all of these things.”
The pair aim to publish a book about the walk with Brighton-based Époque Press.
They will also be recording interviews and sounds for a possible radio programme.
