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Montgomery, Newtown and Knighton are all towns built for looking around. Montgomery has a square of Georgian houses under a ruined castle, with a brick town hall and a clock at the top of the street. Newtown lines the Severn. Between them run villages of black-and-white timbered houses, and England is never far off.

It is easy country to settle into for a week, with somewhere different every day. Take the back roads, buy your dinner at a farm shop and let the days arrange themselves. Offa’s Dyke runs the length of it, and you are rarely more than a few miles from the path.

This has been a border for twelve hundred years. In the eighth century Offa, king of Mercia, had a great bank and ditch dug along the line between his English kingdom and the Welsh. He ruled from 757 to 796, and nobody has ever settled whether it was a defence, a boundary or both.

Around eighty miles of that earthwork survive. In places it still stands shoulder-high, running straight over the hills and across the fields with its ditch on the Welsh side. You can put a hand on it, which is not something you can say of much else this old.

Montgomery gave its name to the old county of Montgomeryshire and was its county town. Henry III began the castle on the rock above the square in about 1223, and a small town grew up in its shadow. The Georgian houses below went up much later, when the county courts still sat here.

Knighton grew up on the dyke itself, and its Welsh name says so: Tref-y-Clawdd, the town on the dyke. The earthwork runs through the middle of it. Not many places in Britain have a twelve-hundred-year-old frontier at the end of a street.

You can walk the dyke now. The Offa’s Dyke Path runs a hundred and seventy-seven miles, from Prestatyn on the north coast down to Chepstow on the Severn. The stretches near Montgomery and Knighton are among its best, and an afternoon of it gets you back for tea.

The Offa’s Dyke Centre at Knighton sits about half way along the trail and has the maps, the displays and a tea room. It is where most people planning a long stretch of the walk start.

Montgomery is worth an hour on its own. Bunners on Arthur Street has been an ironmonger since 1892 and is still run by the same family. It is a rabbit warren of a shop selling seed potatoes, kitchenware and wood-burning stoves under one roof.

Newtown sits on the Severn a few miles west of the dyke, at the end of the Montgomery Canal. South of it the border towns string out towards Hay-on-Wye, each with its own market day and its own square.

Today you will rarely drive more than half an hour between any of them. Take the back lanes rather than the main road, stop at whichever market square you land in, and buy the dinner where the farms sell it.