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Nott Square sits at the top of the town with the castle gatehouse behind it, and King Street runs down from the corner. Almost everything worth eating and drinking in Carmarthen is on those few streets, and you can walk the lot in ten minutes.

The Tywi runs along the south side, wide and tidal. From the bridge the road goes east up the valley towards Llandeilo, and south to Llansteffan and the sea, which is twenty minutes off.

Carmarthen market has been the reason to come here for a very long time, and one stall in it produced something that now has the same legal protection as Parma ham.

The Rees family have been butchers in this county since 1850. In the 1970s Albert Rees had a stall in the market. A customer asked him to hang a Welsh ham for longer than usual, so that it could be eaten raw rather than cooked.

It worked. Salted, air-dried and left alone for months, the ham came out deep red and sliceable, and it turned into a product rather than a favour. It has been made by the same family ever since, now into the sixth generation.

In 2016 it was granted protected status in law, which means the name can only be used for ham cured in this county to that method. It is still the only cured ham in Britain that holds it, and the comparison everybody draws is with Parma and Serrano.

You can still buy it from the family, at their counter in the covered market. The Carmarthen Deli on Cambrian Way sells it by the gram. The family have been curing it in this county every year since the 1970s.

The covered market opens six days a week, and Wednesday brings in the whole county. The stalls run to cockles gathered off the estuary at Ferryside, Welsh cakes cooked in front of you, and laverbread, which is boiled seaweed and better than it sounds. There is a second-hand bookstall people drive in for.

Wednesday is still the day to aim for, and the covered market opens at nine. The outside stalls run along Market Way, and by the middle of the afternoon the best of it has gone. Park at St Catherine’s Walk, five minutes from the hall, and go in on foot.

Sewin is the other thing worth asking about. It is sea trout out of the Tywi, netted in early summer, and it rarely travels far from where it is landed. If you can see it on a menu anywhere in town, order it.