Train and cab in rural areas
 

I have some experience in driving in England, and it was not easy, and it was expensive to rent a car. A few people have told me that taking the train to most tourist destinations and then hiring a cab for further journeys is not all that difficult. Example: train to one of the Cotswolds towns, and then cab further to explore smaller villages. Any comments?

You just can't generalise.

The example you quote, as you describe it, is very tricky. There's only one railway station in the Cotswolds that really has handy taxis. And if you think hiring cars in England is expensive, wait till you try hiring a car together with a driver for any considerable length of time. There's zero unemployment in the Cotswolds, and taking a taxi for a day is at least as costly as it would be in any other affluent area 60 miles from one of the world's two commercial capitals.

OTOH, using public transport to get to, say Burford, then taking a cab to another town with reasonable public transport links is perfectly feasible. There is a reasonable bus network in the Cotswolds. It's of limited use if you want to visit lots of places in a short time, but it will get you from point A to point B

I can't find a reliable guide to the bus/train connections on the Web (infuriatingly, Thames Trains, the Cotswold Line operator, puts an excellent guide to the buses that connect directly with trains in the hard-copy timetables for its London-Hereford service. But they're not in the downloadable .pdfs on the Web, and the connections don't show up in any of the railway timetable websites. You might try phoning them to see if they'll post you a hard copy).

Apart from the Cotswold stations after Oxford on the London-Hereford line, trains also go to Kemble and Cheltenham. www.carlberry.co.uk provides links to bus timetables. But some of these links are now a bit elderly, so they need double-checking.

Other touring alternatives, of course, are bikes and your own feet. Seeing five Cotswold tourist traps isn't five times better than seeing one (there's a limit on how many different thatched cottages most of us want to see at in a day), and a couple of days walking the footpaths around a centre is, IMHO, what this area's all about.

Other parts of England are easier to see by public transport, and most visitors would find a car a downright nuisance in London, Oxford or York.

The Celtic nations in the UK have lower average wages, and long-distance cabs may sometimes make more sense than in England.

Post a more specific question and you'll probably get more helpful answers.

Hello Flanneruk. Thanks for a very helpful message, even though I wasn't very specific. What you suggest for the Cotswolds is exactly what I had in mind, going by train to one town, and getting to another by cab or bus. I'd like, for instance, to do the short walk between Upper and Lower Slaughter. I'm not very interested in tourist trap inns and shops, but would love to walk and see the country side and a small village or two. On a previous trip, we spent 3 nights in Beeley, on the Chatsworth estate. One hundred people, one pub, few tourists except us in that village, and it was wonderful. But driving in the peak district was not. We are also, because of the current exchange rate, planning to do day trips out of London without overnights as much as possible. And I love trains, so....

Other possible destinations are Bath, Portsmouth, Winchester, of course Cambridge, Stratford-on-Avon.

I haven't thought much about bus connections. I'll see what I can find out.

Thanks again

And in your Beeley example, it would have been relatively easy and painless to get a taxi from the station at Chesterfield (which has a row of taxis just waiting for people like you), stay in - I assume - the Devonshire Arms, and spend three days walking the area.
As well as being spell-bound in admiration for the prices Mrs Cavendish (aka the duchess) gets away with charging in her farm shop. And, if last Saturday was any guide, getting furious the damn pub had sold out of black pudding, and Mrs C had sold out of Derbyshire Oatcakes.

In each of the cases you suggest, it's certainly possible to see a slug of stuff in the area using cabs or public transport (using Bath as a centre, to Wells, Glastonbury etc for example). And mostly, buses allow a serious walk. From Bath, for instance, you can get a morning bus to Wells, do the 13-mile circular hike through Preedy, be back in Wells for Evensong at the cathedral and still get a bus back to Bath for a proper dinner.

It's just the Cotswolds that are tricky. Organising for a taxi to take you from Kingham station to the Slaughters - for instance - is easy (though, unlike Chesterfield, Kingham hasn't got a cab rank and the station's in the middle of nowhere so it needs advance planning): what's messy is then getting to see Broadway, Northleach etc without a car. To which your answer - don't bother - is spot on.

One trick in the Cotswolds is to stay near a railway station (and only Moreton in Marsh and Oxford, and at a pinch Charlbury, have hotels within walking distance of a station that works more than once a day) and use the booklet of train-based walks, "From the Thames to the Wye" (www.clpg.co.uk/clpgfwtt.htm) which lets you see a lot of this slice of the area using just trains and feet. Just about all the places you mention have locally-produced books that give you similar examples of seeing the area on foot from one base, using buses or trains to get to the outlying areas.

As usual, flanneruk has given you great advice.

But I have a more fundamental question. You say "because of the current exchange rate, planning to do day trips out of London without overnights as much as possible."

Well, London is one of the most expensive places to stay in all of Europe. If it is country you want to see you would save a LOT of money staying in the country for a few days. Using London for a base for more than one day trip is pretty extravagant. By staying somewhere outside - say near Bath, or in the Cotswolds - you could get a better room for half the cost and be able to take several short trips by bus or cab in the general area.

That would really stretch you touring budget.

Hi Janis. Your point is well taken. We are spending 3 weeks in London, and don't plan to spend too much time out of London. I think it was Dr. Johnson who said "there is in London all that a man can desire" or something close. And we booked a self-catered flat early (I am a compulsive early planner) before the fall of the dollar. Oh well. And for Flanneruk, or anyone interested in staying in Derbyshire near Chatsworth, I recommend a little B&B called Fold Farm, in Beeley, with very pleasant, comfortable accomodations. It's a 300 yearold farmhouse, with small rooms, bu luurious linens, for those who like that sort of thing. And the usual immense breakfast, far better cooked than most. We paid 50GBP a night 2 years ago, very much less than the Devonshire Arms. I do, however, greatly admire the Duchess as a writer and business woman, and Chatsworth is one of the greatest of English Houses. Thanks to both for the excellent advice.

David