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The castle gatehouse stands above the river with the county offices built around it. Below that the Tywi runs out through flat green fields towards Carmarthen Bay, and the sands at Llansteffan are about eight miles downstream.

West of the town the road runs to St Clears and on into Pembrokeshire. The turning off it drops down to Laugharne in twenty minutes, and Pendine and its beach are ten minutes beyond that.

In 1819 something happened in a hotel garden in this town that changed Welsh culture permanently, and it was largely the work of one man with a pocketful of stones.

Thomas Burgess, the Bishop of St Davids, had called an eisteddfod. That is a competition in poetry and music, held in Wales on and off since the Middle Ages. This one ran at the Ivy Bush, the coaching inn on Spilman Street.

Among those attending was Edward Williams, a stonemason from Glamorgan who wrote under the name Iolo Morganwg. He had invented a ceremony he called the Gorsedd, a gathering of bards inside a circle of stones. He had first held it on Primrose Hill in London in 1792.

On the morning after the competition he laid a small circle of stones out in the hotel garden, taking them from his own pocket, and held his ceremony inside it. The bards wore ribbons of different colours to show their rank. He presented the whole ceremony as an unbroken survival from the ancient druids. Almost none of it was, and scholars said so within his lifetime.

It did not matter in the end. The two have been joined ever since, at every National Eisteddfod held since that morning in Carmarthen. The ceremony he invented in a hotel garden is now the centrepiece of the National Eisteddfod every August.

The ribbons are robes now, in white, blue and green. The high point is the chairing of the bard. The winning poet is called out of the crowd and led to a carved wooden chair on the stage. The whole thing goes out live on television. Wherever the festival pitches each year, it is still doing something that started at the top of Spilman Street.

The Ivy Bush is still on the same corner and still taking guests. The town round it is small enough to leave the car for, which is not true of many county towns.

Spilman Street runs east towards the Roman amphitheatre, and you can walk from one to the other in ten minutes. The market is five minutes downhill the other way, and the castle gatehouse stands behind Nott Square.