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West of the bank the ground lifts into the Clwydian hills, and Moel Famau tops them at 554 metres. South of those the Dee has cut a valley through to Llangollen, with the Berwyn moors closing it in.

Wrexham holds the eastern side, a market city a few miles inside the border. Ruthin and the Vale of Clwyd sit behind the hills to the north-west, and Llandrillo further up the Dee.

Offa was king of Mercia from 757 to 796, and Mercia was the English kingdom that ran up against Powys along this line. Around the year 785 he had a bank and a ditch thrown up to mark where his kingdom stopped and somebody else's began.

Offa's Dyke is 82 miles of earthwork. Where it survives best it measures about 20 metres across including the ditch, and stands some 2.5 metres high. It is still traceable for much of that distance, between the Wye valley and Wrexham.

The detail that gives it away is which side of a hill it takes. Wherever the dyke meets high ground it swings round to the western side, so that a man standing on it always had an open view out of Mercia and into Wales.

That is not the line of a fence. It is the line of something meant to be watched from, by people who wanted to see who was coming. A study in 2014 dated one stretch to the late sixth century, which suggests Offa extended what was already there.

The Offa's Dyke Path follows it today, and it crosses this region from the Dee valley up over the Clwydian Range. You can pick it up east of Llangollen and walk out onto open hill inside the hour, with the border underfoot the whole way.

Llangollen is the base most people choose for that. The town sits on the Dee with the steam railway running west, the canal running east and Telford's aqueduct four miles along it, 127 feet above the river.

Wrexham is the other half of the region and the better stocked for rooms. You can walk from its market to the Racecourse Ground in a few minutes, and Chester sits twenty minutes east over the border.

Between the two, and out towards Ruthin and Llandrillo, the valleys stay quiet and the roads run well. The Horseshoe Pass north of Llangollen is the one to drive if you only have time for one of them.