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The hills here are wide and green and almost bare, cut by fast streams and grazed by sheep. Rhayader keeps a butcher, a baker, a chemist and half a dozen pubs, and Llandrindod Wells and its supermarkets are twenty minutes down the road.

It is a place for doing not much at all. Walk the open tops early, come down to Rhayader for the evening and enjoy how quiet the Wye valley gets after dark. Few places in Wales feel this far out, and it is still only two hours from Birmingham.

These bare green hills are the Cambrian Mountains, the high backbone of Wales. For centuries they were a barrier, a wide empty upland that travellers went round rather than over, and the drove roads across them were the only routes there were.

People called it the green desert of Wales and worked it only lightly, with a few sheep farms and the odd hillside lead mine. Cwmystwyth was mined from the Bronze Age onwards, and the spoil heaps it left are still bare of grass today.

The rivers are the exception to all that emptiness. The Severn and the Wye both begin high on Plynlimon, within a short distance of one another, and carry the rain of Wales away east into England.

The Severn is the longest river in Britain at about two hundred and twenty miles. The Wye runs a hundred and fifty-five and is around the fourth or fifth longest. Both of them start as a boggy trickle you could step over.

Now the emptiness is what people come to Rhayader for. You can walk for hours on the open tops, following a stream up to its source and dropping into the next valley, and meet almost nobody all day.

Plynlimon is a long, boggy climb rather than a sharp peak, and at 2,467 feet it is the highest ground in these mountains. From the top on a clear day you can see across to Cadair Idris and the Brecon Beacons at once.

Hafren Forest sits seven miles west of Llanidloes on the flank of the same mountain, and the Source of the Severn trail starts there. It is eight miles of forest track and open bog, a hard half-day in proper boots, and a carved wooden post marks the spot at the top.

Below all that the young Wye runs down through Llangurig, which stands at around a thousand feet and is said to be one of the highest villages in Wales. Rhayader is seven miles further on, where the river finally gets a proper valley.

It is fine cycling country too, with long quiet lanes around Rhayader and Llandrindod and hardly a car to trouble you. The Elan Valley trail out of Rhayader is traffic-free and flat, which suits anyone with children on bikes.