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The Glasgow Orange Defenders Flute Band is already gearing up for Saturday's march. "Edinburgh, we're coming down the road! Ooooooooooooosh" reads a recent post on its Facebook page.
The Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland predicts that more than 10,000 will attend this weekend's parade in the capital, featuring bands, banners and members in full regalia.
It will be an unprecedented show with a particular flavour of pro-union strength, but it has already raised serious concerns that it could inflame sectarian tensions at this volatile political moment.
After a 12-year-old spectator was hit in the face with a bottle at an Orange walk in Glasgow this July, pro-UK supporters worry that any further violence could drive undecided voters towards yes. The Better Together campaign has firmly distanced itself from the event.
The march will be "a loud, proud and noisy affair" according to the former grand master Ian Wilson.
Wilson, now convenor of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland's strategy group on the referendum, adds: "One thing you can't say about the Orange Order is that it's dispassionate." He believes that the pro-union Better Together campaign has taken an "academic" approach that has failed to convey a heartfelt case for the union.
"There is a passion about Scots and we will rise to that. Our only concern is that, because there has been passion in the debate, some people may try to be disruptive," he says.
He points out that the grand master has written a letter to be read out to all marchers in advance, calling on participants to be on their best behaviour, to respect any counter-demonstrations and not respond to provocation.
"I think it's pretty choice to be lectured by Better Together who keep reiterating that we are not and never will be part of their campaign," he adds.
Their criticism is, he implies, disingenuous.
"Who is surprised that the Orange Order would do what it does, and demonstrate what it believes on the streets? It's a thoroughly democratic way of expressing our views."
As for the suggestion that the march may encourage Catholic voters to swing to a yes vote, he says: "Catholics in Scotland know very well what the Orange Order is. It's really insulting to Catholics to suggest they will be swayed by it."
With 50,000 members and 600 lodges across Scotland, the Orange Order is bigger than any single political party. While its presence is felt most obviously in the union flag displays in pubs in Glasgow's Bridgeton and Ibrox, and across the central belt around Airdrie, Bathgate and Falkirk, its membership extends countrywide.
David Walters, a financial manager and district master of the Perthshire lodge, will be marching with his local banner, which memorialises Christian martyrs killed in the Battle of Dunkeld, 1688. Walters will go to Edinburgh with his wife and four young daughters.
The event should be "a family affair" he says. "This is about celebrating our culture, our heritage. I'm really proud to be Scottish but also to be British, and I don't want to see that broken apart."
Walters, who will be marching in full Highland dress, wearing his mother's Campbell tartan, says he is particularly anxious about how a yes vote would affect the army and Scotland's defences against terrorism, as well as about the potential for growing republicanism post independence.
The order remains a powerful organisation, says Ian Wood, historian and author of Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA.
"It's a predominantly working-class organisation, strongest in the post-industrial areas across the central belt, and some of its values of collectivism and fraternity are not so far away from those of Old Labour."
While the order belongs to an older Scotland, he points out that people of all ages will be marching on Saturday, the bands in particular representing a strong, contemporary, youth culture of unionism.
"Given that a lot of Catholics formed the traditional Labour vote after the first world war, and that Labour vote is now swinging towards independence, there could be a blowback that could work to the advantage of the yes campaign."
The order is tolerated at best by mainstream pro-union backers, he adds. "It is not an exaggeration to say that respectable, bourgeois Scotland – much of which is behind Better Together – hate the Orange Order. These are not the people they want to have onside in the no campaign."
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