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If there is a stereotype of the exotic, it would surely be warm, probably tropical, momentarily familiar but then alluring and mysterious, and most importantly, with an ever-present promise of something unutterably romantic. Hardly the Czech Republic in a cold snap. But exotic it was, the warmth excepted, that is. Well, the hawthorn branches were stacked with three inches of snow.

So much is familiar of course. Baroque churches with their green onion-domes stand proud and tall, speaking loudly of Central Europe; turretted castles really do appear at every turn, familiar and yet somehow escaping, all the more fanciful and magical.

But then there is the language. Germanic has crossed into Slav. The orthography may be recognizable, but the Czechs make it do unspeakable things. Letters stack up in tortured combinations and unaccustomed accents put them through unaccountable gymnastics. As I drove, warnings and advice sat, taunting and inscrutable:

Pozor Vlak, Vstup Zakazan, Plzensky Prazdroj.

But the Bohemian woods and uplands were somehow dreamy, as mysterious as the middle ages. Fairytale castles really did rise out of the mist. There it came upon me, that unaccountable, illogical feeling, that around the corner something wonderful was about to happen.

I visited three UNESCO-listed towns, in a large circle around Prague. The first was Kutna Hora, an hour east of the capital, which in the fourteenth century was the Kingdom’s second town, when a silver rush led to a Czech golden age.

It was here that they minted the Prague gros--in the Vlassky Dvur (the Italian Court) you can still see the silversmiths’ alcoves cut into the wall--and it became a sterling-like standard for the middle ages, making the Czech King, Vaclac II, one of the richest in Europe. Later, when the standard of the gros dropped, they re-launched with another coin, the Joachimstaler, the last five letters of which have given us the twentieth century standard, the Dollar.

Kutna Hora is laid out on a higgeldy-piggeldy hillside plan, a response to the mine-works underneath. Above cobbled streets and colonnades stand the brightly-coloured and carved facades of the patrician houses (and just a few concrete intrusions from the communist era). The late gothic Kamenny dum, the Stone House, shows its riches in floral finials, sculptures of saints and jousting knights, and beneath them, in a sub-stratum, friezes of miners.

But the finest sight in the town is St Barbara’s Cathedral, approached along a ridge-top ‘bridge’ lined with baroque statues, not unlike Charles Bridge in Prague. The three Cathedral towers rise in graceful curves like a trio of Ottoman tents, topped with golden balls. Inside, against a background of semi-permanent crepitus from the tickling coughs and shuffling feet of a group of German schoolchildren, I admired the late Gothic frescoes in the various side-chapels dedicated to winch-operators and minters.

It is one of the fun parts of the job to look out for national stereotypes when travelling. I made an impromptu survey over a beer or two... “So what are, who are, the Czechs?”, I quizzed an aquaintance.

“Oh, the Czechs are moody and they’re always complaining”, he joked. “The beer-glass...”, and the Czechs are unlikely but confirmed beer drinkers (I once went to the country to follow up just two words: Budweis and Pilsen), “is always half empty”.

But they are artistic and creative too. “Lots of writers and musicians,” he said. (Almost Bohemian, it occurred to me, although in fact the Czechs do not use the word and the wild lifestyle is a literary fabrication of the last century.) Later a professional linguist put to me that the Czech language was funadamentally fuzzy to think in... Then again, the Czechs are punctual and hard-working. It’s worth remembering that before the Second World War Czechoslovakia was among the ten richest nations in the world.

Another of Vaclac II actions in the fourteenth century was to clear up the robber barons of the Bohemian uplands, allowing traders to travel safely and forge their routes through the centre of Europe. Fortified towns clustered at the key points and became markets.

And so to Telc, a hundred miles south, just inside Moravia. As I drove, the countryside heaved, over hills topped with woods of pine and fir, and then sighed, dropping into hollows where farms buildings and deciduous trees clustered around lakes. So far from the sea, fish ponds were a vital source of food and they were perfected as boggy land was drained or dammed all over the area.

Telc itself seems to rise out of a lake. In the calm wintery grey the water was sheer as gun-metal, etched only with the yellow of the former Jesuit Monastery hanging in reflection and scratchy, leafless trees. Suddenly there was that feeling again; that unwarrantable, totally irrational feeling of optimism. I wandered around Telc with a fixed smile and wide eyes.

Sixty perfect baroque facades sat cheek by jowl on a huge, wedge-shaped square--russet offset with yellow, green on beige, white and royal yellow, with trompe-l’oeil stone-work and graffito designs and topped with crenellations, stepped gables, cherubs and outsize decanter stoppers. Windows stared, their lintels curved into raised eyebrows, and the rounded archways of the colonnade beneath stood like so many toothy gaps.

It is in the colonnades that today’s marketeers have congregated. Just as the Czechs took their cut five hundred years ago when the traders came through, so they surely will again. The twentieth century’s flood of people, tourists of course, has begun again in earnest.

From Telc I moved on to Cesky Krumlov in the far south of Bohemia, close to the Austrian border. The town sits on a tight S-bend where the River Vltava, which later passes through Prague, snakes through a gulley. The tight circular streets, traced in cobweb around the slope, are dominated by a massive castle above the town. It was started by the Rosenbergs in the thirteenth century--stone roses, their symbol, run through the town like a leitmotif--and was developed into the nineteenth by the Eggenburgs and Schwarzenburgs.

No doubt the castle was a foreboding place in the middle ages--bears are still kept in the moat--but now it has taken on a rust of glorious antiquity, its gothic courtyards with their sixteenth century frescoes and its baroque rooms, stucco ceilings and whole walls hung with tapestry. Detailed records left by the Scharzenburgs mean that many rooms are restored exactly as they were two centuries ago and more. The Masquerade Hall from 1748 shows all the characters from the commedia dell arte, painted on the walls: Scaramouche and Harlequin are emerging from the wall.

I suppose the notion of that impossibly romantic moment must be like chasing tomorrow – as I headed towards it, it kept receding around the next corner.

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