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The lanes off it wander through Llanpumsaint, Llanllawddog and Brechfa, and you can drive them for half an hour without meeting another car. Talley has an abbey ruin standing between two lakes, put up around 1185 and left to fall down after Henry VIII closed it.

The coast is never more than half an hour away. Laugharne sits on the Tâf estuary with a ruined castle above the mud, and Llansteffan faces it across the channel with a castle of its own. Pendine, five miles on, has seven miles of flat sand.

Before the railways, the cattle of west Wales walked to London. Drovers gathered them at Llandovery and took them east over the hills in herds of several hundred, shoeing the animals for the road and swimming them across the rivers. It took about three weeks each way.

The men carried the farmers' money home again, which made them a target. Highwaymen worked the drove roads, so the drovers took to carrying paper instead of coin. The paper had to be issued by somebody every farmer in the county already trusted.

That is how a bank came to be founded in a small Welsh market town. David Jones, a farmer's son who had started work at fifteen and droved cattle himself, opened the Llandovery Bank in 1799 in what is now the King's Head. He died in 1839 worth £140,000.

Everyone called it the Black Ox Bank, because Jones printed a Welsh black ox on the left-hand side of his notes. Lloyds took it over in 1909, and the ox carried on appearing on local Lloyds cheques for another twenty years after that.

You can still follow the drove roads. Most of them are green lanes and bridleways now, and the ones climbing out of Llandovery towards the hills are open to walk. The King's Head is still a pub on Stone Street, in the middle of the town.

Llandovery itself is worth an hour, and there are cafés and a bookshop round the square. A castle mound stands above the town with a tall steel figure on top of it. It remembers Llywelyn ap Gruffudd Fychan, a local man the English executed here for sending an army the wrong way on purpose.

North of Carmarthen you can ride four waymarked mountain bike trails through Brechfa Forest, which covers 6,500 hectares. The green Derwen trail is a gentle introduction and the red Gorlech runs nineteen kilometres over three big climbs. Natural Resources Wales keeps them open every year, from the car parks at Byrgwm and Abergorlech.

The Tywi valley below it is about the quietest driving in south Wales. You can leave Carmarthen after breakfast, be at Llandeilo in twenty minutes, over the Black Mountain by lunchtime, and back down on the coast by four.