Hi - we have six full days to meander from York to Heathrow in our rented car. We would like to see N. Wales, some Cotswold villages, and Bath, but have no set route in mind. Is there a resource that would tell us what the best (i.e. most scenic) routing might be? Thanks.

I'd urge you strongly to rethink your definition of "best" as "most scenic". Spectacular scenery - especially spectacular scenery visible from a car -isn't what we do here: what we specialise in are:

- places you drive into, get out of the car and look at/understand what humans have built, and how they've lived, for the past 2,000 years, and/or
- places you get out of the car and walk around the countryside. The best scenery is almost always on the footpath a couple of hundred yards from the car.

As far as I'm aware, no route planning website here includes "scenic route" as an option. Most real road atlases (the ones printed on paper and bound into a proper book you can actually drool over: £2.99 at practically any petrol station) have little green strips along bits of the road which purport to show pretty bits. But the very nature of road atlases means they show only the larger, busier roads.

The Michelin one by my desk here, for example, shows no green strips in the Cotswolds at all, and practically none in North Wales. That's not just a devious French plot to destroy our tourist industry - though I wouldn't put that past <i> les grenouilles </i> : driving through the Cotswolds isn't that pleasant for the driver, since the views are often hidden behind hedges or available only from side roads. The chocolate-box prettiness hits you when you're out walking or for the couple of seconds when you're driving into a village (or, more often, into a town)

One way of accessing pleasant side roads on the Web at one site, for free, is at the &quot;Get cycling&quot; section of www.sustrans.org.uk. It needs a bit of fiddling with, since it's mostly designed for cyclists and a small proportion of the routes suggested aren't 100% accessible for vehicles.

Over six days, I'd say you need to detour up to North Yorkshire, belt over to North Lancs, zoom straight to N Wales (though anyone zapping past Liverpool - so failing to devote at least a day to the world's greatest city, and Britain's biggest repository of buildings worth looking at outside London - is seriously in need of help in my view), toodle gently through Shropshire, head south past Ludlow to Leominster, then across to the northern Cotswolds through Tewkesbury before turning SW again to Bath.

You need to look at each bit of this separately, getting the road routes in each area from a site like sustrans, but having limited expectations of the view from the road between each bit. Tell the RAC.co.uk planning site to suggest a non-motorway route for each long-distance trek, though take the motorways for North Lancs-North Wales and the drive to (I assume) London from Bath, unless you've time to divert through the central Cotswolds and Oxford

And I'd say you'll get the best suggestions from posters here if you repost, forgetting about scenic routes and asking about recommended itineraries.

Here are some links for scenic drives.
http://www.touristwales.co.uk/Drives/Drives.html

http://www.goldeneyemaps.com/scenic.php

Interesting question and dificult to answer...
I would suggest that you tackle this by linking together several National Parks. Use motorway to connect them, and then spend your time pottering around them, in and out of the car.
You could link the YORKSHIRE DALES, PEAK DISTRICT, SNOWDONIA PARK, BRECON BEACONS and drive through the Cotswolds to get back to London. It would give you a good taste of the various terrain of england and Wales. Us Ordnance Survey to pick the smaller roads in the natianl parks. Good luck.

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/getamap/

http://www.nationalparks.gov.uk/index.htm

Flanneruk is correct; you need to define &quot;best&quot; much more broadly than just scenery.

The Automobile Association (AA) used to publish a book &quot;Tour Guide Britain&quot;, describing and mapping 30 tours that visit what they consider to be the most interesting spots in Britain, including scenic routes. My copy is 1991; whether they still publish it, I don't know. Well worth looking for in libraries or used book sellers if they don't.