JD Vance was “blown away” by Caernarfon Castle during a visit with his wife to North Wales, the US vice-president has revealed in a new book about his faith.

“It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen and it’s not particularly close,” Vance writes of his 2013 visit to the 13th-century castle, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in an excerpt from his book published in The Sunday Times., external.

He and Usha Vance, who studied at Cambridge, were attracted to the site of King Charles’s investiture as Prince of Wales in 1969, because he said it was “a great tourist stop”.

Her experiences there and in the UK gave her a new perspective on life and marriage, she writes.

Vance said what stood out to him most was the age of the castle compared to “old” buildings in the United States.

“Our house in Cincinnati was built about 150 years ago and people call it historic,” he writes.

“This castle, on the other hand, was already hundreds of years old when English settlers first landed in the United States.

“For almost a millennium, young people climbed the castle walls and watched the sun reflect on the surrounding water.”

Before his trip to the castle, Vance said he had never experienced the feeling of being small in an “infinite” universe, he writes in Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith.

“But here, on the banks of a river I’d never heard of, in a castle we selected as a cool tourist stop, I felt for the first time something similar: the scale of time and how little of the life of the world we would ever see.”