lyndie9

Retired US planning 1 to 2 month visit, looking for smaller town or village to day travel out by train to different locations. Have considered Oxford. Looking a for a safe friendly place to walk around and enjoy.
Any ideas, suggestions are appreciated.

janisj

Oxford is great -- but hardly a village. It is a pretty large city (though the core/college area is fairly compact)

If you want a city -- then Oxford, York, Chester, Cambridge, and several others have scenic/historic centers, nice rural areas nearby, and decent rail connections.

If you want a village -- then do you know which part(s) of England/the UK you plan on visiting? Because knowing that will help you decide which rail lines you'd like easy access to.

bvlenci

I consider a village to be a place with about 5000 inhabitants. In most parts of the world, places that small don't usually have a train station. It's more likely that you could find a village with a train station in a circumference of five miles, but if you won't have a car, that might be too far. Another problem is that small train stations usually don't have many trains stopping there.

I suppose a "small town" might have 20,000 people or so. Even places this small might have very limited train service.

Are you averse to buses?

ribeirasacra

Banbury, but it is classed as a town.
Great Missenden large village
Thetford another small town
Edale very small village
Hungerford small vilage.
Petersfield smallish town?
Bedwyn then get a bus to Marlbrough.
Look them up if you are interested.

lyndie9

Will research further suggestions given (thank you), no not opposed to buses or rail/bus combo for travel. Will want to visit coastal locations, Lake District, Scotland, which seems to suggest northern locations.

janisj

You mentioned Oxford . . . that is why most of the recommendations are south.

For the North and/or Scotland - places I'd be happy for a couple of months might include <B>York</B> (if you want a city), <B>Thirsk</B> -- not a village as such but a small town (James Herriot connections) on a mainline train that can get you to Edinburgh/Scotland, Newcastle and nearby Hadrian's Wall, Durham, the coast etc., <B>Durham</B> (another city), <B>Alnmouth</B> convenient for all of Northumberland, the coast and Edinburgh/Scotland.

europeannovice

If you wanted to visit the southeast, we recommend Tunbridge Wells. We stayed there while touring the many sites in the area and found it to be centrally located and convenient. We had a car but there is a train station in town that goes to central London. The southeast area has tons of things to explore.

For north, we also loved York. Wish we had more time to explore the surrounding areas around York.

flanneruk

"Will want to visit coastal locations, Lake District, Scotland, which seems to suggest northern locations."

You're getting some confusing advice here.

Britain's 2,500 railway stations include hundreds easily accessible on foot from the centre of a village (def: settlement without a town council or market charter but with two of a post office, pub or Anglican church). Only two of them (Edale and Great Missenden) have been recommended on this thread - and Great Missenden has at least 5,000 people more than most people's population threshold for a real village.

As a rough generalisation:
- you can't visit Scotland from a village base in England. There are a few stations in southern Scotland that meet your brief and make an interesting base for Edinburgh, and occasionally other bits of the Border country. But they're not really practical for anywhere else in Scotland. Some of the rest of Scotland can be visited by train, but it gets messy.

- Practically every station in and around the Lake District more or less meets your brief (see map at http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/css/Of...ilmaplarge.pdf CAUTION: this map is NOT exhaustive) There's virtually nowhere outside the immediate vicinity of the Lakes that meets your brief and works as a base for the Lakes

- Along Britain's 12,000 miles of coastline there are some bits with really good rail connections, capable of being visited from a small settlement on them with a good rail service: North Wales and South Devon are the two most obvious examples. This is also true for in SE England (fully exhaustive rail map at http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/static...South_East.pdf though most coastal stations on this are either in serious towns or in grizzly suburban sprawls. Burnham on Crouch and Rowlands Castle are two glorious exceptions) Most of the coast, though, isn't conducive to rail-based pottering around.

- The one English base that really offers rail (or bus) connections to most of the rest of England/Wales is London, though Birmingham also has extraordinarily good rail links to lots of nice places. Your wish list of "coastal locations, Lake District, Scotland " is close to impossible to visit from just one or two train-friendly small places. It might JUST be possible from bases in just Liverpool and Glasgow. The blunt truth is that big cities have far better connections if you want to visit lots of places

- But Bradford on Avon meets all your brief, except that it got the whole panoply of town seals, burgesses and a self-governing town council in medieval times. Its extraordinary range of direct train connections is one of the many benefits of late 20th century railway privatisation: it had almost none in the dismal days of endless government-mandated railway closures.
This partly explains why there are busy railway stations in far smaller English settlements than in the fast-declining neoCommunist Eurozone. There taxes are wasted on headline-grabbing fast government-operated trains between a handful of destinations while lines elsewhere just die. Here, passenger traffic at Hanborough station, 10 miles outside Oxford, has trebled in the past decade for example, and Charlbury and Moreton in Marsh (again: burdened with town status under those tourist-unfriendly medieval monarchs) on the same line are pretty, mostly pre-20th century, highly liveable and offer remarkable public transport links.

It's not clear to me whether your priority is to find somewhere small and nice to live for two months, or ways of seeing lots of Britain without a car. If it's the former, you might have to find a compromise: Bath and Oxford are England's two nicest, central, walkable places with a wide range of direct train (and in Oxford's case, bus) services in many directions that probably best meet your brief, and their railway hinterland (like Islip, Charlbury and Bradford) might work too. Neither Bath nor Oxford, though, are any more walkable than Liverpool, both can easily be mind-numbingly pricey (their rural exurbs can be a great deal cheaper), and neither are any good at all for the Lakes or Scotland. Oxford's railway connections are about to be radically improved from late summer 2015.

The best strategy, after clarifying your objectives and cutting your wish list down, would probably involve:
- accessing detailed railway maps, listed and hyperlinked at the bottom of http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/statio...ions/maps.aspx What read at first like suburban networks in fact include extremely dense connections, often with surprisingly frequent service, to smaller villages in their rural and coastal hinterland

- checking the connections these places offer. Go to http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/statio...ions/maps.aspx , input the station name then press "show"

MissPrism

I think that many people will be saving that reply, Flanner. Very helpful

lyndie9

Thanks all, time for me to dig in and figure this out! Flanner, first goal a small friendly place to stay, with access to train travels for the occasional adventure. The national rail link will be very useful. Looking at weekend classes at Oxford just for the experience. Fodorites you are wonderful.

ESW

I think it will be difficult to find one place that meets all your criteria.

Thinking north, three places spring to mind.

First is Penrith which is a small town rather than a village. It is a delightful place with a reasonable range of shops. It is on the edge of the Lake District and has a train service to Scotland or south to Lancaster and beyond. There are also buses to different parts of the Lakes.

The other two places are Hexham and Haltwhistle. Both are in the Tyne Valley and have a regular train service to Newcastle and Carlisle. Either of these give access to Scotland. Carlisle also gets you into the Lake District. Hexham is a small market town with a good range of shops and a lovely old abbey. Haltwhistle is a village rather than a town. Again it has a lot of character and is a very friendly small place.

janisj

lyndie9: You seem really drawn to Oxford (fabulous place) but want a small town/village.

Maybe consider Woodstock. No train service, but an easy bus ride to Oxford and then the rail connections flanner describes.

Or maybe a village like Kingham -- it does have a train station from which you can connect through Oxford.

Or Moreton-in-Marsh or Charlbury which also have stations.

Kandace_York

Thirsk is indeed a lovely town, but if you're traveling only by rail, be aware that you'll have quite a healthy hike from the rail station into town. It's not terrible fun to begin with, and it's less fun if you arrive in the evening (dark comes fast) and you're hauling luggage.

I *love* Thirsk and would go back in a heartbeat, but if you're not expecting that atypically long hike it is a bit of a jolt.

janisj

but there are taxis in Thirsk.

Anyway, w/ the OP's mentions of Oxford my guess is she'd like a place down south.

MmePerdu

Adding "occasional adventure" opens up the possibilities, assuming the adventures to the Lakes & Scotland don't need to be day trips. Oxford is a great place and, having spent time in the area, I believe there will be a town, if not a village, that meets your requirements.

If I consider only towns that have direct service to Oxford, Goring & Streatley (that's 1 station) and Pangbourne come to mind, nice areas, fairly close to Oxford (20 miles more or less), not villages but have a village feel.

skatterfly

I agree that many people, myself included, will find these responses useful. One of our "next" next trips, we'd like to see more of the UK, without necessarily having to drive. Great info here.

stokebailey

Thanks, Flanner and all.

starrs

Great post, flanneruk. Thanks!