Bodysgallen Hall sits just outside the main resort world, and one immediately feels the change in manners. The seafront performs. Bodysgallen composes itself, which is often more dangerous.

The hall is a Grade I listed building, which places it in the top two per cent of protected buildings in England and Wales. It dates from the seventeenth century, with earlier elements, and stands in extensive grounds with formal and walled gardens that were laid out over several centuries of careful and somewhat immodest ownership.

It is a Grade I historic house with gardens, views and a country-house atmosphere belonging to an older order than the promenade hotels. The air is quieter, though not necessarily more innocent.

The hall is now operated as a hotel and spa by Historic House Hotels, a collection focused on preserving significant country houses through a combination of careful restoration and paying guests. This seems to work better than most of the available alternatives.

The gardens include formal terraces, a walled rose garden and woodland walks with views towards Snowdonia and the coast. The knot garden (a formal geometric design of low hedging and herbs) is among the features cited when serious garden people talk about the property.

Its importance to Llandudno is that it broadens the area’s story. Within a short distance, one moves from Victorian resort to landed history, gardens and the edge of rural Conwy, which is a useful reminder that Llandudno is not the whole of North Wales, however much it occasionally behaves as if it is.

Use Bodysgallen when the promenade feels too public and the pier has become intolerably cheerful. It reminds one that refinement need not shout, though it may still raise an eyebrow.

The dining is part of the experience. A formal country-house dinner is a different register from promenade fish and chips, though neither should be dismissed. Context, as Miss Mostyn has observed before, determines almost everything.

Country houses have always known that good manners and bad behaviour are not opposites. They are often found in adjacent rooms.

For the visitor who finds Llandudno’s Victorian resort story insufficient on its own, Bodysgallen offers an older, quieter chapter. The town begins at the seafront. The area, however, begins much earlier.