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Below it the town sits along the River Dee, and the valley runs east and west from there. The canal goes one way on the flat, the steam railway the other, and the Horseshoe Pass climbs north onto open moor.

Further out the country empties quickly. The Berwyn hills fill the south side of the valley, and the lanes over towards Ruthin and the Vale of Clwyd are quiet enough to walk down without meeting much.

The Welsh princes of Powys Fadog put a castle on the hill above the town in the 1260s. It was a native Welsh castle rather than an English one, which is a good deal less common than you might think in this part of the country.

It lasted about twenty years. Edward I conquered Wales, the castle had no job left to do, and it was abandoned. It has stood as a ruin for something like seven hundred and fifty years since, which is far longer than anybody ever lived in it.

The name means the fortress of Brân, and Brân is a figure out of the Mabinogion, the collection of medieval Welsh tales. Whether the hill is named after him or he after the hill has never been settled, and probably cannot be.

A mile up the valley stand the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey, founded in 1201 and closed in the dissolution. The Pillar of Eliseg in the field beyond it is older still, a ninth-century stone raised by a king of Powys to record his ancestry.

The walk up to the castle is steep and open with no shelter on it, so take proper shoes and a coat. Most people are up and down inside two hours, and what you get at the top is the Dee valley one way and the Berwyns the other.

Down in the town the river comes through under a stone bridge and the steam railway runs west along the valley from the station beside it. East of the town the canal goes the other way, flat and quiet, out towards the aqueduct.

Between the canal one way and the hills the other you can walk for days here without covering the same ground twice. Offa's Dyke Path crosses the valley just east of the town and climbs out over the moor towards the Clwydian range.

The town fills up in the second week of July for the music festival, so that is the week to plan around, one way or the other. The rest of the summer you can generally turn up and find the valley absorbs everyone without much trouble.