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You do not have to walk all of it. Most people pick one headland and do three or four miles, then catch the coast bus back. The cliffs between New Quay and Aberaeron are the best of it.

Around 250 bottlenose dolphins live in the bay all year, the largest resident group in Europe. They come closest in at New Quay between April and November.

People have been putting visitors up on this coast since the railway reached Aberystwyth on 1 August 1864. Before that the town was a small harbour and a lead-shipping port, and the fashionable set went to Tenby instead.

The line changed it inside a decade. Terraces went up along the front, the Royal Pier opened the following Good Friday, and boarding houses filled the streets behind. Aberaeron and New Quay, which had built ships and landed herring, found a second trade in summer lodgers.

The herring went first, at about the time of the First World War, and the shipbuilding had gone before that. What was left was the coast itself, and in the end the county council and the Ramblers set about joining it up.

The Ceredigion Coast Path opened on 4 July 2008: sixty-five miles from Cardigan to Ynyslas, put together largely by Ramblers volunteers working with the county council. It later became part of the Wales Coast Path.

The path runs in sections between villages, and the T5 bus along the A487 links most of them, from Cardigan up to Aberystwyth. That is the practical reason to stay with a host: they can tell you which three miles are worth your morning, and when the bus comes back.

The other thing worth asking about is the dolphins. Around 250 bottlenose dolphins live in Cardigan Bay, the largest resident group in Britain, and New Quay is the best place on the coast to see them from dry land. The Cardigan Bay Marine Wildlife Centre on the quay there runs boat surveys through the season and will tell you what has been seen that week.

Breakfast is worth turning up for. Crab and lobster are landed at New Quay and Aberporth, and Teifi sewin runs in early summer. The Hive on the quay at Aberaeron makes its honey ice cream in the town, and people queue down the harbour for it.

Aberaeron is the prettiest base and the smallest, a grid of Georgian terraces painted in blocks of colour around a working harbour. New Quay is steeper and more of a fishing village, with the beach below the houses. Aberystwyth has the most going on and stays open in winter, because the university keeps it busy.

Aberystwyth still runs its County Show every June, and Musicfest fills a week in July with classical concerts and recitals at the Arts Centre. Wherever you land, a day here keeps much the same shape: a stretch of the coast path in the morning, then a beach or a harbour after lunch.