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Llantwit Major stands where that coast begins. The lanes behind it run through Bonvilston and Treoes to Cowbridge, which is one wide street of independent shops, and Barry sits east along the coast.

Cardiff Bay is a short drive from all of it. You can spend the morning on the cliffs at Southerndown and the evening in a capital city, without moving your bags.

There are two lighthouses at Nash Point, along the coast from Llantwit Major. There is a reason for that. A paddle steamer called the Frolic went down on the reef below in 1831 and everybody aboard was lost.

Seventy-eight people drowned in a single night in March, in sight of a shore nobody could reach them from. Trinity House sent an engineer called Joseph Nelson, and within a year there were two towers on the headland.

Trinity House put up two rather than one for a reason. Line them up from the deck of a boat and you know you are clear of the rocks. See them apart and you are heading for the sands.

They stand nine hundred and ninety feet apart, the eastern tower thirty-seven metres tall and the western twenty-five. The coast either side has taken a great many ships. The rock runs a long way out under the sea in flat ledges, and from a boat you cannot see any of it.

Nash Point was the last lighthouse in Wales with keepers living in it. The last two left on 5 August 1998, and everything has been automatic since.

You can go up the eastern tower on open days, and the compressed-air foghorn is still sounded twice a month for visitors, which is worth timing your walk around. There is a car park at the top and a tea room beside it.

At low tide the beach below turns into a stone floor, laid flat in layers you can walk out across. The limestone is about two hundred million years old, and there are fossils in it if you look down.

The cliffs behind Southerndown are striped dark and pale, and they come apart slowly, which is why the fossils keep arriving on the sand. Keep away from the bottom of them.

The beach below those cliffs is Dunraven Bay. There is a walled garden above it where a house used to stand, and an Iron Age fort on the headland over that. Its car park is the usual start for the coast path in both directions.

Cowbridge is the other direction and a different sort of day. One wide main street of independent shops, and the sort of place you go to for lunch and leave three hours later.