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You can get on it, too. There is a public right of navigation as far up as Hay-on-Wye, and canoes generally carry on a little beyond that to Glasbury. Hire is easy to find at Glasbury, Hay and Monmouth.

The gorge itself is the last stretch. The river leaves the farmland behind, cuts down between wooded cliffs, and does not come out again until Chepstow. Above the gorge the valley is open, green and full of sheep.

You can put a canoe in at Glasbury and work down the valley over several days, or take a single afternoon of it and be picked up further along. Few British rivers give you that right of way along them.

It was the salmon that made the Wye famous. The biggest ever recorded weighed fifty-nine and a half pounds and was caught in 1923, and for a century this was the river English anglers wrote books about.

Fish that size have not been seen for a long while. The spring run fell away badly through the last century, and it has only been climbing back since the early 2000s.

Anglers still come. The salmon season runs from 3 March to 17 October, and every fish caught on the Wye has to go back in the river.

Most of the fishing is booked through the Wye and Usk Foundation, a charity set up at Talgarth in 1995 when the salmon were disappearing. Its Fishing Passport, started in 2003, is now one of the biggest day-ticket schemes in Britain and covers over two hundred waters.

The best of the river is not the famous stretches. It is the ordinary ones, where the woods come down to the bank, there is nobody about, and a heron lifts off ahead of you.

Hay-on-Wye sits at the top of the navigation, a long way above the gorge, where the valley opens out towards the Black Mountains. Monmouth and Ross-on-Wye are the other places on this river with a proper high street, and Ross is over the border in Herefordshire.

Above Hay the river is a different thing entirely. It comes off Plynlimon as a hill stream and runs down through Rhayader and Builth Wells long before it reaches any of this. That upper half is Powys hill country, and the river changes character completely once it crosses into the border counties.

The Wye Valley Walk follows it the whole way from Chepstow to the source. Much of the lower half is level going, on old towpath and the bed of the railway that used to run up the gorge.

Each town along it meets the river differently. Hay looks over a wide shallow reach, Monmouth sits back in the fork where the Monnow joins, and Chepstow stands on a cliff with the tide underneath. Ross-on-Wye, over the border, watches a great bend of it from its churchyard.