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The north has the mountains and the castles. The mountains of Snowdonia come right down to the coast at Conwy and Caernarfon. Inland at Betws-y-Coed and Beddgelert the footpaths start at the end of the street.

Further south it softens. Pembrokeshire has the cliffs and the small harbours. The Gower, a peninsula west of Swansea, ends in a long beach at Rhossili, and the roads through the green middle of the country are mostly empty.

There are more than six hundred castles in Wales, and the four best are all in the north-west. Edward I, the English king, put them up in the thirteenth century to hold the country after he conquered it.

Beaumaris, Caernarfon, Conwy and Harlech are the four, and together they are a World Heritage Site. Caernarfon has bands of coloured stone copied from the walls of Constantinople, now Istanbul. The point was to show everyone who was in charge.

Harlech stands on a rock above the dunes with a stairway of a hundred-odd steps cut down the cliff, because the sea once came up to the foot of it. The sea has since gone out by half a mile.

All four are open to visitors and you can walk right into them. Conwy has a ring of town walls round the old streets outside its castle. The walls run three-quarters of a mile and carry twenty-one towers, and climbing up costs nothing.

Beaumaris is the one to see if you want to understand how a castle works. It never got finished, so the walls stop half-height in places and you can see straight into the middle of it.

Conwy and Caernarfon are about half an hour apart, so you can do two in a day without hurrying. Llandudno is ten minutes from Conwy when you have had enough of walls.