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Give a day to Llangollen. Walk up to Castell Dinas Brân for the view down the valley, a steep two hours there and back on open hillside, and come back along the canal. Then take the Horseshoe Pass out, because it is one of the great roads.

Wrexham is the other half of it, twenty minutes north-east and a city since 2022. The Clwydian hills lie to the west, Offa’s Dyke runs the length of the border, and Chester is close enough to be a wet-day option.

In 1947, with Europe still in pieces, a man from Coedpoeth called Harold Tudor had an idea that on paper was ridiculous. He worked for the British Council, and he proposed that the small town of Llangollen should invite the world to come and sing at it. Nobody had much money and half the continent was rubble.

They came anyway. That first year choirs arrived from seven foreign countries and joined singers from England, Scotland and Wales. Thirty-three choirs in all, twenty-seven of adults and six of children, in a Welsh valley two years after the shooting stopped.

Then, in 1949, a choir came from Lübeck. Germany, four years after the war. Whatever anyone in that field was feeling, what happened was this: the Germans were met with tears, tea and sandwiches, and introduced to the audience as our friends from Germany.

One man from Coedpoeth picked the town, on the theory that people who are singing at each other are not doing anything worse. He was not wrong. The festival has come back nearly every summer since, and a place of some three and a half thousand takes in the world for a week.

For the other fifty-one weeks this is one of the quietest corners of the country. The river comes down the middle of it and the Clwydian hills sit to the west. The border is close enough that this is the first Welsh ground a great many visitors from England ever set foot on.

Wrexham is the place with the beds, the buses and the shops. You can walk from the market to the Racecourse Ground in a few minutes, and St Giles' church carries a tower of 136 feet. Erddig lies on the southern edge of the city with gardens running down to the valley.

Two roads make the region worth driving. The Horseshoe Pass climbs north out of Llangollen onto open moor and drops into the Vale of Clwyd. The lane along the Clwydian ridge gives you the vale on one side and the Cheshire plain on the other.

You can fill a week without going far. The steam railway runs west up the Dee valley and the canal towpath runs east on the level to Telford's aqueduct. Chirk Castle and Erddig sit within twenty minutes of each other south of Wrexham, and Moel Famau rises to 554 metres in the hills to the north.