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McLean also has a lovely old art deco cinema, the Avalon, which has been restored by a Route 66 association. (Sadly, though, just like the U-Drop, it was closed when I visited.) And on Route 66 itself, McLean boasts the first Phillips 66 petrol station to be opened in Texas. Built in 1929, it served the town for more than fifty years, and it’s now been beautifully restored by the Old Texas Route 66 Association. The bright colours of its freshly painted pumps were a stark contrast to the faded splendour of most of the rest of the town. It is apparently the most photographed petrol station on Route 66. It no longer pumps gas, though.

In what remains of the centre of town, McLean’s main attraction is housed in a former bra factory that once gained the town the fantastic nickname ‘Uplift City’. But it no longer specialises in lingerie; now it’s a museum dedicated to barbed wire. That might sound daft, but barbed wire – or the devil’s rope, as they call it – is a very important thing in Texas. I’ve always thought of the Colt and the Winchester as the tamers of the Wild West, but apparently barbed wire was much more important in bringing order to the wilderness.

Invented by a man called Samuel Glidden, who made millions when he became the Henry Ford of the ‘thorny fence’, it was highly controversial at first. To the settlers of the American West, it provided security and stopped cattle barons from driving their herds across the settlers’ land. But many others wished Glidden dead because his invention ended the era of free grazing on the range – which led to absolute misery out there.

This was the land of huge drovers’ trails hundreds of miles in length. I’d passed a famous one the previous day, the Chisholm Trail, which led right across Texas and Oklahoma. There was also the Goodnight-Loving Trail, named after the cattlemen who used it to move longhorns from Texas all the way to Wyoming. For years, anyone could move cattle along these trails. But then people got selfish and started demanding fees, like tolls, to pass through their land. When that happened, all hell broke loose, and people started shooting each other. Anyone who put up a barbed-wire fence could stop herds in their tracks and charge for the water. This prompted countless feuds, many of which escalated into range wars, such as the Lincoln County War, which culminated in a gunfight at Blazer’s Mill, a shootout that turned a young cattle guard called William McCarty into a fugitive better known as Billy the Kid.

With vigilante justice reigning supreme, much blood was shed and many communities were torn apart by the range wars. Eventually the lawmen settled the disputes, but by then the devil’s rope had changed the nature of the West. So barbed wire already had a very unsavoury history, even before pictures of a corpse hanging over barbed wire and concentration camp inmates clutching barbed wire became symbols of the First and Second World Wars.

Within years of its invention, Glidden’s wire spanned the nation from the Great Lakes to California, following a line very similar to that later taken by Route 66. Although Glidden ruthlessly sued anyone who infringed his patent, hundreds of rival designs were patented and many of them are now on display in McLean’s museum. I’d never realised there were more than two thousand types of barbed wire, and that they even make barbed-wire jewellery and barbed-wire cocktail stirrers in Texas. The names of the different types are intriguing: Half McGlynn, Braided, Pitney, Evans, Elsie, Kitter and Ford. I’d always thought all barbed wire was the same – a series of double twists of wire around a long length of wire, seemingly designed to cut an L-shaped gash in your shorts when you were escaping from the orchard with your jumper full of apples and the farmer shouting, ‘Come back here yer bunch of bastards.’ But in the museum there were all sorts of designs on the walls, in cases and in cabinets. And people actually collect the stuff, too. They even have their own magazine, imaginatively titled Barbed Wire Collector.

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