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Four miles east the canal runs out of land and keeps going anyway. Telford carried it across the valley on a cast-iron trough held up on eighteen stone piers, well over a hundred feet above the river.

West of the town the steam railway climbs the valley towards Corwen, and north of it the Horseshoe Pass lifts onto open moor. The Berwyn hills fill the skyline behind, and Offa's Dyke crosses the valley just east.

The aqueduct is called Pontcysyllte, and it is the reason this valley carries a World Heritage listing. Thomas Telford and William Jessop spent about ten years on it and opened it on 26 November 1805, and it has been in continuous use ever since.

It is 336 yards long and carries the canal 127 feet above the River Dee. The trough is cast iron and the eighteen piers below it are stone. The channel is about twelve feet across, wide enough for one boat and no more, so crossings take turns.

The detail that makes people go quiet is the edge. On the far side from the towpath the iron sides of the trough rise about six inches above the surface of the canal. Beyond that there is nothing at all between a boat and the drop.

A helmsman crossing it has no visual protection from the sense of being at the edge of an abyss, which is how one account puts it. UNESCO added the aqueduct to the World Heritage list on 27 June 2009, more than two centuries after it opened.

You can walk across it. A railed path runs down one side, and it takes about ten minutes to get over and the same to come back. Trip boats also cross from the wharf above Llangollen, at walking pace with the valley wide open underneath.

Getting there is easy either way. Drivers take the basin at Trevor on the far side. Walkers go out along the canal from Llangollen, which stays level the whole way and allows a little over an hour in each direction.

Closer in, the Dee comes through the middle of town under the old stone bridge. The heritage line runs west up the valley from the station beside it as far as Corwen, and the engines are the reason a good many visitors come at all.

A mile up the valley the ruins of Valle Crucis Abbey stand beside the road, and the Horseshoe Falls beyond them feed the canal with the flow it needs. Both sit a short drive out, or a long and rewarding walk from the town.