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Carmarthen is the county town and the practical middle of everything, twenty minutes from Llandeilo and half an hour from the sea. Llanelli sits at the far south-east corner, where the estuary opens out towards the Gower.

The hills behind Llandeilo hold the best of the county. Carreg Cennen stands on a limestone crag ninety metres above the River Cennen, and on a clear day you can see the Brecon Beacons from the top of it.

Dinefwr was the seat of the princes who ruled this part of Wales, and whoever held it was reckoned to hold the south. The old castle stands on a wooded bluff above a bend in the Tywi, half a mile from the town of Llandeilo.

The Rhys family lived on the estate for more than three hundred years. Newton House, the mansion in the middle of the park, went up in 1660, though what you see now is a Victorian front bolted onto the older building behind it.

In 1775 they called in Capability Brown, the most sought-after landscape designer in Britain, to advise on the deer park. His plan was to move trees and open views so the whole thing looked as though nobody had touched it, which was rather the point.

The National Trust bought the deer park in 1987 and the house three years later. What they took on with it was a herd that had been grazing the same ground since long before any of the buildings existed.

There are White Park cattle at Dinefwr today, an ancient breed with white coats and black ears. The records put them in this park for more than a thousand years. Every year in spring they come back to the pasture in front of the house with their new calves.

Around a hundred fallow deer share the park with them. The woods still hold more than three hundred oaks over four hundred years old, one of the great collections of ancient trees in Britain. Below the deer park the ground drops to a wet meadow on the Tywi floodplain, and a boardwalk runs out across it to a bird hide.

Llandeilo is ten minutes' walk away and worth the walk. Its painted terraces climb a hill above a stone bridge, which crosses the Tywi in a single arch of 145 feet. That is the longest of its kind in Wales.

Carreg Cennen is eight miles further on, and it is the one castle in Wales nobody forgets. From the courtyard you can go down a stone passage cut inside the rock itself, which comes out in a natural cave beneath the walls.