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Hay-on-Wye is right on the English border below the Black Mountains, and it is not much bigger than a village. Abergavenny is south of there, a market town with a ruined castle and three hills standing round it.

Llandudno and Tenby were built as seaside resorts two hundred years ago, and it still shows. Llandudno curves round its bay under the Great Orme, the big limestone headland at the end of the bay. Tenby stacks pastel houses above a harbour that empties right out at low tide.

Llangollen holds a competition every July that started in 1947. An eisteddfod is a Welsh festival where choirs and dancers compete for prizes. This one was set up after the war, to get the nations talking to one another again.

In 1949 a choir came from Lübeck in Germany, four years after the war ended. The town met them at the station with tea and sandwiches. One of the German singers said afterwards the Welsh women kissed them, and the whole choir cried.

In 1955 a young Italian sang here in his father’s choir from Modena, and they won their class. He was training to be a primary school teacher at the time. His name was Luciano Pavarotti.

It still runs every July, and the town fills up with choirs from all over the world. You can buy a day ticket and wander between the tents, or sit in the big concert hall for the evening.

The whole of Hay runs on second-hand books. About twenty shops sell them in a town of under two thousand people, and the literature festival every summer brings writers and readers in by the thousand.

Every September Abergavenny gives a whole weekend over to food. The market hall, the castle grounds and half the streets fill up with people selling what they make. Thirty thousand come to eat their way round a market town.