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Two and a half miles inland from Aberaeron is Llanerchaeron, a small Georgian estate the National Trust has looked after since 1989. The villa was finished in 1795 to a design by John Nash, early in his career.

It was laid out as an estate that fed itself, and it still works that way. There are walled gardens, a dairy and a home farm. The produce goes on sale at the door. The coast is twenty minutes west and the Cambrian Mountains half an hour east, so a beach day and a hill day start from the same doorstep.

Two and a half miles inland from Aberaeron, up the Aeron valley, is a small estate that shows what self-sufficiency actually looked like before anyone used the word.

Llanerchaeron was finished in 1795 for Colonel William Lewis, to a design by John Nash. Nash went on to lay out Regent Street and Regent’s Park in London and to remodel Buckingham Palace, but he was unknown then and working in Wales after a bankruptcy. The house is one of the best survivals from that early part of his career.

What makes it unusual is not the villa but everything behind it. Nash laid out a service courtyard with a dairy, a brewery, a salting house and a laundry, all built so the estate could feed and supply itself without going to market.

The same family held it for more than three hundred years. It passed to the National Trust in 1989 on the death of its last owner, and it had barely been altered in all that time.

The walled gardens are still working, and the vegetables, fruit and eggs grown there go on sale at the door. The home farm keeps Welsh Black cattle and Llanwenog sheep. Parkland walks follow the river, and there is a second-hand bookshop in the old buildings.

It suits a self-catering week particularly well, because it is the kind of place you can drop into for an hour rather than making a day of it.

It is a good place to sit in the middle of. Aberaeron is five minutes back down the valley, with its Georgian terraces around the harbour. The Cambrian Mountains start half an hour inland, and the coast path runs the full sixty-five miles from Cardigan up to Ynyslas.

Self-catering here tends to be converted farm buildings and old estate cottages rather than purpose-built blocks, because that is what the county had. Stone barns, often a mile or two from a village, with the sea somewhere down the hill.

Shopping for a week is easy enough. Aberaeron and Cardigan both have proper butchers and bakers. Crab and lobster are landed at New Quay and Aberporth through the season, and Llanerchaeron sells its own produce at the door.

When the weather turns, the day changes rather than ends. The National Library at Aberystwyth is free to walk into, Monday to Saturday. The National Coracle Centre at Cenarth, twenty minutes up the Teifi from Cardigan, keeps the one-man willow-and-hide boats that were fished on this river for centuries.