The biggest event in horse racing’s flat season calendar gets under starter’s orders at 4

The biggest event in horse racing’s flat season calendar gets under starter’s orders at 4.20pm today, as 14 horses battle it out over a mile and four furlongs in the Epsom Derby. If you turn on the TV just before the race, you’ll get a glimpse of the industry’s finest, decked out in top hat and tails, sipping champagne and preparing to shout their horse all the way home to the finishing post.
But while all the contenders in this year’s Derby may be fielded by seasoned and wealthy owners, you don’t have to be a millionaire to get involved in the horse-racing world. You’ll get the odd free ticket to the races (with owner’s badge), invites to your horse’s stables, and monthly newsletters updating you on your horse’s progress and upcoming meetings.With this particular package, any prize money is donated to a horse welfare charity. For as little as £50 a year, it’s possible to own a share in a racehorse, and for a few thousand pounds more, you can own a 25, 50 or even 100 per cent stake in your own colt, filly, mare or stallion.The cheapest and most straightforward way to become a racehorse owner is to join a syndicate or racing club. Doubles start at £175, including breakfast.Quaint Holiday Cottages, Llantwit Major, Vale of Glamorgan (01446 796471; ). A week’s rental costs from £490.Visiting ThereSt Donat’s Castle (01446 799100; )Further InformationVale of Glamorgan Tourism (01446 700111; ). I’m still annoyed they repainted that bridge, though.Maggie O’Farrell’s new novel, ‘The Distance Between Us’, is published by Review, £7.99 GIVE ME THE FACTS Getting ThereMaggie O’Farrell’s trip was organised by the Wales Tourist Board (0800 915 6567; ).The Vale of Glamorgan is served by Arriva Trains Wales (08709 000 773; ) from around Wales and First Great Western (08457 000 125; ) from London Paddington to Cardiff.Staying ThereThe Vale Hotel, Hensol Park, Hensol, Vale of Glamorgan (01443 667800; ).

You can have sun and sand without the hoards and gastro-pubs which now afflict much of Britain’s coastline And the beaches are clean, beautiful and varied. The walls, the houses, the gateposts, my primary school, the kerbs.My sisters and I used to spend weeks on Southerndown strand, a beach that morphs at high tide from a steep bank of smooth grey pebbles to a vast stretch of sand at low tide. It is now a college but you can still walk around the walls and paths once trodden by Charlie Chaplin, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, indulging both your medieval and your Roaring Twenties fantasies all at once.The Vale of Glamorgan is one of the few places left in Britain where it is possible to have a real, old-fashioned bucket-and-spade holiday. He bought it for his mistress, Marion Davies, sending a cable to his London office which read, simply, “Buy St Donat’s Castle”. St Donat’s, a castle near Llantwit Major, was once owned by William Randolph Hearst, the American newsprint millionaire.

I don’t know if the ghost survived the make-over or not but I felt proprietorial, seeing all these people marching about the gravelled paths. When we used to go there we were the only people among the over-run lawns and dilapidated trellises.It’s true that a large portion of the Vale of Glamorgan is taken up with unappealing urban-industrial sprawl. But between the M4 and the coastline is some lush, green countryside. There are primroses and campions in the verges beside the roads. There are potteries, castles, farms and rivers with ancient, worn stepping-stones over them Merthyr Mawr is a preposterously picturesque village I used to go to Brownie camp there.

And if you drive further, through the village you get to Merthyr Mawr Warren, a cluster of immense sand dunes with streams and tiny paths through the gorse.There is even a taste of Hollywood in the area. Conservationists have taken it on and cleared the pond, neatened up the borders and refurbished the glasshouses. Not much remains of it and sheep graze on its crumbling front steps but, oddly, its walled garden was saved from the bulldozers. I remember this as a forgotten, overgrown wilderness, an exciting secret garden with a tumbledown glasshouse, a turreted salthouse, and an ornamental pond choked with weed. It had the added thrill of an alleged ghost – a lady who was said to appear at dusk, smelling of mimosa. I take my two-year-old son there on a hot day in May and I am gratified that the concrete of the curving path down to the water’s edge still feels exactly the same under bare soles: stippled, grainy, pleasurably uncomfortable. There are still rockpools caught in the undulating wave-cut platforms, the cliffs rearing up on either side.

You can still buy ice-creams and buckets at a kiosk in the carpark, the sea is still the colour of weak tea, and the stones make the same hollow, ambient sound as you walk over them. I sit with satisfaction on a rock and watch my son, who removes all of his clothes and hurls them, one by one, into the sea, shrieking with glee.Southerndown has, clinging to the cliff, the ruins of Dunraven House, a mansion inexplicably dismantled in the 1960s. It is so unlike the South Wales that I remember that I am relieved when I drive the next day towards Bridgend and I finally see some factories This is more like it Maybe South Wales hasn’t changed much after all. But visiting the town where I spent so much of my * childhood is an odd experience.